Future Power Solutions for Exploring Hypothesized Surfaces – Watts on Psyche?

INSTITUTION

Arizona State University (ASU)

CLASS

Platinum Class (2025 – 2026)

STUDENT TEAM

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Psyche Power Solutions is a five-student senior design team at Arizona State University building an end-to-end power management system for a hypothetical surface rover at asteroid 16 Psyche. The project is implemented on two complementary platforms that share a single control algorithm: a Python simulation with a graphical interface that models orbital solar irradiance as a function of both the asteroid’s orbital position and the rover’s latitude on the surface, battery state of charge, and long-term component degradation across mission timescales, and an Arduino Giga R1 hardware build that runs the same algorithm in real time with physical switches, potentiometers, and a display shield.

At the heart of the system is a priority-based load scheduler that manages various of instrumentation, communications, and housekeeping devices. As the battery charges and discharges through the rover’s day, the algorithm shifts between Normal, Low Power, and Survival operating modes, shedding non-essential loads when energy is scarce and restoring them when generation recovers. Fault injection and degradation profiles let the team stress-test how the algorithm responds to hardware failures and years of wear; the kind of conditions that, in a real deep-space mission, cannot be recalled or patched once the spacecraft leaves Earth.

This work was created in partial fulfillment of the Arizona State University Capstone Course “EEE 488/9.” The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.