Guests: John Batchelor, Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Dr. David Livingston.  Topics: The Psyche Mission, mission experiments, the potential dollar value of Psyche and much more.

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John Batchelor and I welcomed back to the program Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the PI for the Psyche mission which recently launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket.  It will take about 5 years to reach the asteroid with a Mars assist and it will be on station for about 26 months.  Our guest described the mission, told us about the instruments on board and the challenges in designing this mission due to the many uncertainties since little is known about this asteroid.  We talked about the potential dollar value and what we learn from this mission may mean for space resource usage and asteroid mining.  Also mentioned were the experiments to evaluate using laser comms back to Earth rather than only radio waves.  This was a one segment program about ten minutes in length.Please post your comments/questions for this discussion on our blog for this show.

You can email Mr. Batchelor or Dr. Elkins-Tanton through me at drspace@thespaceshow.com. Our guest can be reached through the Psyche Mission website.