Fierce, absorbing, and ultimately inspiring. Elizabeth Kolbert riveting book, beautifully written. Washington post from one of the world's leading planetary scientists, a luminous memoir of exploration on earth, in space, and within oneself equal parts ode to the beauty of science, meditation on loss, and roadmap for personal resilience. Deep in the asteroid belt between mars and Jupiter, three times farther from the sun than the earth is, orbits a massive asteroid called Psyche. It is one of the largest objects in the belt, potentially containing the equivalent of the world's total economy in metals, though they cannot be brought back to earth. But syche has the potential to unlock something even more valuable the story of how planets form, and how our planet formed. Soon we will find out, thanks to the extraordinary work of lindy elkins-tanton, the principal investigator of Nasa's $800 million Psyche mission and the second woman ever to be awarded a major Nasa space exploration contract. The journey that brought her to this place is extraordinary. Amid a childhood of terrible trauma, elkins-tanton fell in love with science as a means of healing and consolation. But still she wondered, was forced to wonder as a woman, was science for her. In answering that question, she takes us.