NASA's Psyche spacecraft has begun a voyage to an asteroid.

Now we are zooming away from the Earth at about 6 kilometers per second as we turn on all the subsystems and make sure everything works.

And so far it's just beautiful.

It's Wednesday, October 25th.

But of course, today is Science Friday.

I'm CyFri producer Charles Bergquist. The asteroid 16 Psyche, located in the asteroid belt

between Mars and Jupiter, isn't the kind of asteroid we've studied before made mostly of rock or

ice.

This one is made of mostly metal, something like 60% iron and nickel.

Scientists are hoping that studying psyche might help teach them about how planets form.

Here's guest host Swapna Krishna.

Joining me now for an update on the mission and its goals is Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton.

She's the principal investigator for the Psyche Mission and vice president for the

Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Welcome back to Science Friday.

Thank you so much.

I'm really excited to talk with you about Psyche

today. So we last spoke with you on this program around six years ago when the whole mission

was just a future plan. How does it feel to have it off the ground literally? It's utterly surreal.

I wonder if you've had this experience where you've been imagining, not even really consciously,

but what an event will feel like and what will look like and what kind of room you'll be sitting in

and how it will be. And I've been imagining that casually now for six years. And suddenly now I find

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