A team of engineers and technicians work on deploying and stowing stationary plasma thrusters (SPT) on NASA's Psyche spacecraft inside the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Aug. 4, 2023. This is part of the assembly, test, and launch operations preparations. The SPT are on a dual axis positioning mechanism (DAPM), and together they make a DSM, or DAPM-actuated SPT module. Psyche will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy. Launch is targeted for Oct. 5, 2023. Riding with Psyche is a pioneering technology demonstration, NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft hits a speed bump on the way to a metal asteroid – Ars Technica
2025-05-01T03:18:08Z
“This kind of thing happens and that’s why we build redundancy into our missions.”…
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, located nearly 150 million miles from Earth on the way to an unexplored metal asteroid, has stopped firing its engines after detecting a problem in its propulsion system.
NASA published an update Tuesday revealing that the robotic spacecraft shut off its plasma thrusters earlier this month. The news wasn’t widely shared until Wednesday, when NASA science chief Nicky Fox posted it on X.
“Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission are working to determine what caused a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system,” the agency said. The spacecraft detected the drop in pressure April 1 inside the line that feeds xenon fuel to the spacecraft’s four plasma thrusters.
Sensors aboard the Psyche probe detected a pressure reduction in the xenon fuel line from about 36 pounds per square inch to about 26 psi. “As designed, the orbiter powered off the thrusters in response to the decrease,” NASA said.
The Psyche spacecraft uses solar electric propulsion, a highly efficient means of maneuvering through space that relies on solar-generated electricity and more than a ton of xenon gas stored in seven 22-gallon (82-liter) tanks. Inside each of the mission’s four thrusters, an electromagnetic field ionizes the xenon gas before expelling the ions to produce thrust.
These things happen
Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are looking into the problem.
So far, there’s no effect on the Psyche spacecraft’s trajectory. Psyche’s plasma thrusters can remain unpowered until at least mid-June before the spacecraft would begin to drift off course, according to NASA. Mission managers decided to keep Psyche’s engines turned off until they better understand the pressure decrease. If engineers trace the problem to the fuel line itself, NASA has the option of switching to a backup fuel line to resume thrusting.
“This kind of thing happens, and that’s why we build redundancy into our missions,” Prockter said at a meeting of Mars scientists Wednesday. “We don’t have any concerns at the moment about it, but we’re obviously keeping tabs on it.”
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