Planetary Science Institute

 The Planetary Science Institute (PSI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institute based in Tucson, Arizona, focusing on planetary science. As of 2018, its director is Dr. Mark V. Sykes.[1]

Planetary Science Institute
Established1972
FocusPlanetary science
DirectorMark V. Sykes
Address1700 East Fort Lowell, Suite 106
Location
Tucson
Arizona
United States
Websitewww.psi.edu

Founded in 1972,[2] PSI is involved in many NASA missions, the study of Marsasteroidscometsinterplanetary dust, the formation of the Solar Systemextrasolar planets, the origin of life, and other scientific topics. It actively participated in the Dawn mission, which explored Vesta between 2011 and 2012, and Ceres between 2015 and 2018. It managed the spacecraft's Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector, which mapped the surfaces of the two minor planets to determine how they were formed and evolved.

PSI's orbit@home was a distributed computing project through which the public can help in the search for near-Earth objects. The Institute is also involved in science education through school programs, popular science books and art.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article
 Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the 
Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
.