When I was a little kid I thought I
wanted to be an astronomer. I took a
geology class and there's just something
about having a rock in your hand,
something you could hold and feel. I
thought, you know, we have rocks from
outer space. Maybe I'll study those. I
study meteorites, I love meteorites. It's
like an addiction for me, because I love
exploring the solar system through
understanding these rocks and the places
they come from.
Life on Earth exists on two heat engines.
One is the Sun but the other is the heat
engine below our feet, that drives the
movement of the plates. They drove the
differentiation of the planet. We've
known for two centuries that our core
was made of metal, but we haven't been
able to explore. We can't drill a hole
that deep, we can't explore with any kind
of submersible in the oceans what we've
been looking for for years. Metallic
asteroids are something that's very dense.
Psyche is an asteroid 200 kilometers
across, thought to be metal-rich. Psyche
is our way to explore our own planet.
We have meteorites fall to Earth, some of
them are little tiny pieces, some of them
are the size of cars, but compared to
Psyche they're just tiny little specks
of dust.
When I first started as a graduate
student, we had never visited an asteroid,
not any of them. Asteroids were points of
light in the sky and now they're real
geologic places. They're places we can
visit. More than the awe, more than the
wonder, we have this responsibility to
do this right. And that's why this part
is so important. What we're doing right
now,  designing these instruments because
that will determine whether we get the
data that graduate students 10 years, 20
years, 30 years from now, we'll learn
things about this asteroid that we can't
even imagine today. It's the journey of a lifetime and
I didn't want to miss it.
