Psyche is a NASA Discovery Program space mission launched on October 13, 2023, to explore the origin of planetary cores by orbiting and studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche beginning in 2029. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the project. The spacecraft will orbit the asteroid from August 5, 2029, to October 31, 2031, spending 817 days in orbit. Psyche uses solar-powered Hall-effect thrusters for propulsion and orbital maneuvering, the first interplanetary spacecraft to use that technology. It is also the first mission to use laser optical communications beyond the Earth-Moon system. The proposal for the Psyche mission was submitted by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a principal investigator at Arizona State University, as part of a call for proposals for NASA's Discovery Program missions 13 and 14 that closed in February 2015.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft). Related NASA reference: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/. Description adapted from Wikipedia contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).