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Psyche keeps its date with an asteroid, but now it’s running in backup mode | Engineers switched to a backup fuel line less than a quarter of the way through Psyche's mission.
Engineers switched to a backup fuel line less than a quarter of the way through Psyche’s mission.
Psyche's solar electric propulsion system is more fuel efficient than conventional rocket thrusters, and it works by flowing xenon through an electromagnetic field, which ionizes the gas and expelling the ions at high speed to produce thrust. Ground controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ended up commanding the probe to switch to the backup line last month, and test burns showed the thrusters worked well. At Psyche, the spacecraft will enter orbit and progressively move closer to the asteroid, using a suite of sensors to map its surface, measure its shape, mass, and gravity field, and determine its elemental composition.
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