Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA’s Psyche mission goes ahead, but VERITAS mission is delayed

Georgina Torbet
By

NASA recently announced that its mission to visit a metal asteroid, Psyche, has a new launch date of October 2023. The mission had originally been scheduled for August 2022 but missed its launch date due to not having enough time for testing all the equipment and software. To make sure the mission launches as planned this time, staff will be moved off the planned VERITAS mission to Venus, which will now be delayed by three years.

Following the Psyche spacecraft missing its launch date, NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory commissioned an independent review into the issues which delayed the launch and has now announced how it will address the issues raised in the review report.

Recommended Videos

“We welcome this opportunity to hear the independent review board’s findings and have a chance to address the concerns,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. “It’s our job to notice issues early – this report is essentially a canary in the coal mine – and address them. Information like this helps us for more than just Psyche, but also for upcoming key missions such as Europa Clipper and Mars Sample Return.”

Related

The report from the review board highlighted several issues which contributed to Psyche missing its launch date, including not enough staff on the project, communication issues, and the increase in remote work which meant informal chats between staff members had become less common. NASA has responded by adding more staff to the project and says the Psyche project manager will be setting a hybrid work policy.

However, these new staff will have to be pulled off other projects to work on the Psyche mission. That’s why the planned VERITAS mission to Venus, which is still early in its development, is being delayed. The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission, announced last June, aims to map the surface of Venus and to learn more about the planet’s atmosphere and its volcanic activity, which may be ongoing. This is important to understand how Earth and Venus diverged, as they were thought to once be very similar.

The VERITAS mission had been planned for launch in 2027, but will now be pushed back until 2031. NASA’s other upcoming Venus mission, DAVINCI, which plans to drop a descent probe through the Venusian atmosphere, is still planned to launch in 2029.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
An old NASA spacecraft will crash to Earth on Wednesday
NASA's RHESSI spacecraft.

A retired NASA spacecraft will reenter Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, with some parts of the vehicle expected to crash to the planet's surface.

While most of the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft is expected to burn up as it enters the atmosphere at high speed, some parts of the 660-pound (300-kilogram) machine are likely to survive the descent.

Read more
How NASA’s astronaut class of 1978 changed the face of space exploration
Sally Ride NASA

When you look back on the long history of crewed spaceflight, one group stands out for its radical challenge to the conventional wisdom of who could become an astronaut. NASA's astronaut class of 1978 saw not only its first women and people of color working as astronauts such as Sally Ride and Guy Bluford, but also the first Asian American astronaut, El Onizuka, the first Jewish American astronaut, Judy Resnik, and the first LGBT astronaut, once again Sally Ride.

A new book, The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel, chronicles the story of this class and its impact on both NASA and the wider world’s perceptions of who could be an astronaut. We spoke to the author, Meredith Bagby, about this remarkable group of people and how they changed the face of human spaceflight.
Breaking the mold
Throughout the 50s and 60s, NASA almost exclusively chose fighter pilots for its early human spaceflight program, Project Mercury. That meant that not only were astronaut groups like the famous Mercury Seven entirely composed of white men, but they also came from very similar military backgrounds.

Read more
NASA and Boeing reveal new date for first crewed Starliner flight
A graphic rendering of the Boeing Starliner orbiting Earth.

NASA and Boeing had been hoping to perform the first crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft next month, but on Wednesday they announced the mission will now take place no earlier than Friday, July 21.

“While the Starliner spacecraft build is complete, additional time is needed to close out verification and validation work prior to the system’s first flight with crew on board,” Boeing said in a statement posted on its website.

Read more