A NASA spacecraft rounded Mars in May heading towards its target: 16 Psyche, an ancient asteroid belt object largely made of metal. Formed at the very beginning of the solar system’s 4.5-billion-year history, Psyche could hold clues about metal cores of rocky planets. The mission’s principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, will give an update and insight into Psyche at a Cornell talk Sept. 11.
Elkins-Tanton, director of the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, will visit the Ithaca campus as this year’s Terzian Lecturer, hosted by the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). Her public lecture, “The NASA Psyche Mission: First Journey to a Metal World,” is scheduled for Sept. 11 at 7 p.m. in Rockefeller Hall, Schwartz Auditorium, with observing time at the Fuertes Observatory following.
In the lecture, Elkins-Tanton will discuss what is known and hypothesized about the asteroid, the spacecraft built to study it and what we might discover when spacecraft and asteroid meet in 2029. She will also give updates about the mission spacecraft, which flew by Mars on May 15, using the planet’s gravity to gain speed.
“Lindy has done amazing science, including as PI of the Psyche Mission, exploring a world made not of rock or ice, but of metal,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy (A&S) and director of the Carl Sagan Institute. “She also cares deeply about communicating about science. She’s written books on how to build teams and a beautiful book about her journey as a scientist. It will be a treat for everyone to listen to her and interact with her.”
In her research, Elkins-Tanton studies terrestrial planetary formation and the planetary evolution that follows. She has led four field explorations in Siberia and is co-author of the 2025 National Academies of Science report “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars.” She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Mineralogical Society, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Elkins-Tanton also focuses on creating effective teams for scientific research and other endeavors and is the author of the 2026 book “Mission Ready: How to Build Teams that Perform under Pressure.” She is co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.
Her memoir “A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman” (2022) tells of her life as an explorer of Earth and space, beginning with her early years in Ithaca, where she was born and raised; in it, she writes about the time physicist, Nobel Prize winner and Cornell faculty member Hans Bethe gave a lecture at Ithaca High School.
Elkins-Tanton’s Terzian Lecture is co-sponsored by the Carl Sagan Institute and the Cornell Astronomical Society.
In addition to the public lecture, she will give an astronomy department colloquium talk, “The NASA Psyche Mission: Preparing for the Science of an Unknown Object,” on Sept. 10 at 3:30 p.m. in Space Sciences Building, Rm. 105.
The Terzian Lecture honors the late Yervant Terzian who was the Tisch Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy at Cornell and chair of the astronomy department from 1979-1999.
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