NASA Psyche Mission Power Electronics Engineer Meena Sreekantamurthy | JPL

NASA Psyche Mission Power Electronics Engineer Meena Sreekantamurthy | JPL

Behind the Spacecraft: Meet Meena Sreekantamurthy, a power electronics engineer on NASA’s Psyche mission, which will be the first to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche. In this video, Sreekantamurthy, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, explains how power is critical for gathering the mission’s science data. She also talks about her passion for painting and drawing.

Whether the asteroid Psyche is the partial core of a planetesimal (a building block of the rocky planets in our solar system) or primordial material that never melted, scientists expect the mission to help answer fundamental questions about Earth’s own metal core and the formation of our solar system. 

This is the second episode in a weekly, five-part video series called “Behind the Spacecraft.” Each Psyche team member will tell the story of how they came to the mission.

Psyche’s launch period opens Oct. 5, 2023. The spacecraft will begin orbiting the asteroid Psyche in 2029.

Learn all about our first-of-its-kind Psyche Mission at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche

For more information about NASA’s Psyche mission go to: www.nasa.gov/psyche and psyche.asu.edu

Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Produced by: NASA 360 Productions

Duration: 1 minute, 50 seconds

Release Date: Aug. 29, 2023

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