'Psyche' scheduled to launch in August and travel 1.5 billion miles to reach target

Officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory unveiled their newest spacecraft, named Psyche, with the mission to explore an asteroid orbiting earth. 

The asteroid, which was discovered in 1852, is also named Psyche. 

"Our goal is to collect info to help us understand how the solar system was formed," Henry Stone, a project manager at JPL, told CBSLA. 

In order to get a close-up view of Psyche, CBSLA's Tena Ezzeddine had to take a dust shower, clean her shoes, not wear any makeup and wear protective gear, all because NASA wants to launch the spacecraft into space completely dust free. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's Principal Investigator and the second woman to win a competition for a NASA mission, said it's taken 11 years to get to this point. 

"There's only one asteroid like this asteroid Psyche. It's a unique object in our solar system," Elkins-Tanton said. 

Scientists think the asteroid may consist mostly of metal from the core of planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Key hardware on the spacecraft - the magnetometer and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer - will detect metal in the asteroid, which could possibly provide insight into how Earth formed. 

"If we know that, then it helps us understand how the planets were formed in the first place," Stone said. 

The spacecraft is scheduled to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in August, but is isn't expected to enter orbit around the asteroid until travel 1.5 billion miles. It will then spend nearly two years studying the asteroid. 

"Space exploration is the story of hope and future and what humans can do when they do things together," Elkins-Tanton said.