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NASA announced Friday the Psyche asteroid mission, the agency's first mission designed to study a metal-rich asteroid, will not make its planned 2022 launch attempt.
Due to the late delivery of the spacecraft's flight software and testing equipment, NASA does not have sufficient time to complete the testing needed ahead of its remaining launch period this year, which ends on Oct. 11.
NASA selected Psyche in 2017 as part of the agency's Discovery Program, a line of low-cost, competitive missions led by a single principal investigator.
"NASA takes the cost and schedule commitments of its projects and programs very seriously," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
As the mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California began testing the system, a compatibility issue was discovered with the software's testbed simulators.
In May, NASA shifted the mission's targeted launch date from Aug. 1 to no earlier than Sept. 20 to accommodate the work needed.
The mission's 2022 launch period, which ran from Aug. 1 through Oct. 11, would have allowed the spacecraft to arrive at the asteroid Psyche in 2026.
There are possible launch periods in both 2023 and 2024, but the relative orbital positions of Psyche and Earth mean the spacecraft would not arrive at the asteroid until 2029 and 2030, respectively.
"Our amazing team has overcome almost all of the incredible challenges of building a spacecraft during COVID," said Psyche Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University, who leads the mission.
Two ride-along projects were scheduled to launch on the same SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as Psyche, including NASA's Janus mission to study twin binary asteroid systems, and the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration to test high-data-rate laser communications that is integrated with the Psyche spacecraft.