Wow, what an exciting afternoon! I had the honor and opportunity to meet and present a lecture to the amazing interns working through Arizona State University’s Psyche Inspired program.

My lecture theme was CONNECTION, which I think we all could use a little more of these days.

Psyche Inspired is a program that brings undergraduate students from any school, discipline or major together to share the excitement, innovation, and scientific and engineering content of NASA’s Psyche mission with the public in new ways through artistic and creative works.

Mission to a Metal World.

“The Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. What makes the asteroid Psyche unique is that it appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system.

Deep within the terrestrial planets, including Earth, scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets’ rocky mantles and crusts. The asteroid Psyche offers a unique window into these building blocks of planet formation and the opportunity to investigate a previously unexplored type of world.”