Mission to Psyche: One Year Into the Spacecraft’s Journey to a Metal-Rich Asteroid - YouTube - solar system studies

All of Psyche's instruments are working:the magnetometer;the gamma ray spectrometer;the neutron spectrometer;the imagers;and the gravity experiment.The Hall thruster engine will be the first such engine used outside the Earth/Moon system.The Hall thruster is an ion thruster engine.An ion is an atom or molecule with an electric charge due to the loss or gain of one or more electrons.Hall thrusters use a magnetic field to limit their electrons' axial motion and then use them to ionize propellant.The most common propellants used are Xenon and Krypton.Psyche could reveal some of the early history of the solar system.Some asteroids are believed to be planetesimals,chunks of material left over from the planet formation process.The definition of a planetesimal is a minute planet,a body that could or did come together with many others under gravitation to form a planet. *Credit:NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-California Institute of Technology/ASU