Deep in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, three times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, orbits a massive asteroid called (16) Psyche. Our upcoming exploration of this metal-rich asteroid marks an important first for humankind: We have sent people or robots to explore rocks bodies, like the Moon and Mars, and icy ones, like Europa and Enceladus, and gas-rich bodies like Jupiter, but never a body made mostly of metal. If Psyche turns out to be what we think, we’ll be visiting a new kind of world. In this Science and Society talk Lindy Elkins-Tanton will explain how a NASA mission comes to be, who is working on our team, and how far we’ve come in building this spacecraft.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist, the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative. Her research concerns the formation and subsequent evolution of rocky planets, and processes of education for the future of society. She has led four field expeditions in Siberia. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite. In 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2021 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Elkins-Tanton received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT.

The library's “Science and Society - Making Sense of the World Around Us” lecture series is co-organized and moderated by Fred Dylla, Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics and author of Scientific Journeys, Linda Dylla, former public information officer at the Jefferson Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, and Colin Norman, the former News Editor at Science.

NOTE: this meeting is being conducted through Zoom. You MUST REGISTER to receive instructions for joining the meeting.

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Basic written instructions for using Zoom may be found here and a brief video tutorial may be found here. Closed captioning is available for all our sessions. Information on enabling closed captioning in Zoom may be found here.