023: Lindy Elkins-Tanton
This week, I had the privilege of talking big ideas, big teams, what can be gained from true capital D discovery pursuits, and the precarious timing involved with these types of high-stakes missions with a personal hero of mine.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a Foundation and Regents Professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. Since this podcast is part of SFI’s InterPlanetary Project, I want to highlight that Lindy is the Vice-president of ASU’s InterPlanetary Initiative. And, She is the principal investigator of NASA’s Psyche Mission, an attempt to understand a metal rich asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter which may provide us with some clues about planetary formation.
Psyche, the mission, flies to Psyche the asteroid next fall, and we discuss what’s at stake for that exploration at length in this episode.
Learn more about everything referenced in this episode by clicking the links below:
Henry Stone at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Voyager Mission - Gravity Assist
Lucy Mission
DART Mission