On October 15, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Director of the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) and a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science (EPS), gave a talk on NASA’s Psyche mission, for which she is principal investigator. The talk was part of a seminar series organized by the Center for Integrative Planetary Science (CIPS), a research center at Berkeley that connects and facilitates dialogue between diverse fields such as planetary science, astrophysics, organic chemistry, geophysics and biology.
Attendees from SSL, EPS and other departments gathered outside Campbell Hall for pizza and networking before filing into room 131 for the talk. Some 50 participants joined in-person and remotely to learn more about Psyche—a NASA Discovery Program mission, which Elkins-Tanton characterized as a collaborative endeavor whose success requires insight from many different disciplines. It was a fitting addition to the CIPS seminar series and aptly demonstrated the advantages of cross-disciplinary collaboration, which is exactly what CIPS hopes to facilitate.
“Presenting to CIPS was a special pleasure, and an essential practice on the Psyche mission,” said Elkins-Tanton. “Getting feedback from so many diverse areas of expertise is critical to achieving big goals.”
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, SSL Director and PI of the Psyche mission, delivers a talk at UC Berkeley CIPS. 
Burkhard Militzer, UC Berkeley CIPS director and EPS professor, introduces Lindy Elkins-Tanton. 
Murti Nauth, Graduate Student Researcher at SSL, asks a question at Psyche talk. 
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, SSL Director and PI of the Psyche mission, delivers a talk at UC Berkeley CIPS. 
The talk was introduced by Burkhard Militzer, CIPS’s director and an EPS professor. Militzer listed Elkins-Tanton’s many accomplishments, including her field research in Siberia. That experience of contending with wolves, bears and Russian bureaucracy, Militzer quipped, speaks to Elkins-Tanton’s profound leadership experience.
“She is an accomplished administrator, like the captain of a ship,” said Militzer. “Hopefully, she will stay on course with Psyche and get exciting results.”
Elkins-Tanton began by summarizing a paper that she co-authored in 2011 in which she proposed a completely new composition of metal asteroid. Four-and-a-half billion years ago, as city to continent-sized planetesimals were forming in our nascent solar system, radioactive isotopes heated those bodies, causing them to develop silicate magma oceans surrounding liquid metal cores. Elkins-Tanton proposed that radioactive isotopes might not have provided enough heat to melt those bodies evenly throughout, which would result in the planetesimals developing frozen silicate crusts.
Elkins-Tanton said that the paper attracted more attention than expected, which led NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to invite her to propose a mission to investigate one of these metallic bodies. In 2014, Elkins-Tanton proposed a mission to 16 Psyche. Roughly the size of Massachusetts, 16 Psyche is the largest iron-nickel asteroid in our solar system. After three years and some 1300 pages of supporting documents submitted, JPL accepted the Psyche mission.
The mission launched in 2023 and carries gamma ray and neutron spectrometers for measuring the atomic composition of 16 Psyche and magnetometers for measuring magnetic fields. It also carries the Deep Space Optical Communications(DSOC) experiment, which is a laser-based system that the Psyche mission tested in December of 2023. At a distance of 19 million miles from Earth, it transmitted a short cat video to JPL at a speed of 267 megabits per second — faster than most Earth-based broadband connections. The experiment has since been completed, and Psyche mission data will be transmitted on the high-gain antenna. The spacecraft will arrive at 16 Psyche in 2029 and begin collecting science data upon achieving orbit.
As she discussed Psyche’s science objectives, Elkins-Tanton said that one of her key mission policies is that everyone on the science team keep an open mind about the data. She said she hopes to avoid the problem of individual team members cherry-picking data that matches their preferred model of planetesimal formation and quickly publishing such findings. This is particularly important because existing data on 16 Psyche is very limited, and so there are few previous studies to constrain biased interpretations of selective data.
“It’s been a while since a spacecraft visited a body for which there was virtually no data from any orbital or flyby asset,” said Elkins-Tanton.
Paul Szabo, an Assistant Research Scientist at SSL and a CIPS seminar organizer, attended the event and said that he was most interested Elkins-Tanton’s description of the breakdown of minerals on metal asteroids by solar wind bombardment, which efficiently releases sulfur atoms. Szabo said the process reminded him of his own research on solar wind bombardment of bodies with extremely thin atmospheres like the Moon and Mercury.
“Talks like this bridge the gap between people whose fields don’t normally intersect, and they can be very helpful in building connections and generating new ideas,” said Szabo. “People should definitely check out the seminars and present their own work.” CIPS seminars are held on Wednesdays at 131 Campbell Hall during spring and fall semesters. Talks begin at 1:10 PM. Lunch is provided from 12:45 PM on the patio outside Campbell Hall.