OSIRIS-REx/OSIRIS-APEX Mission Updates

[catdlr]

OSIRIS-REx Team - 2025 Michael Collins Trophy Winner

Mar 28, 2025  #CollinsTrophy
Announcing the winner of the Museum’s 2025 Michael Collins Trophy for Current Achievement: OSIRIS-REx

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission achieved the first asteroid sample return by the United States, as well as the largest quantity of returned planetary material by any country since the Apollo missions.

The Michael Collins Trophy is awarded annually by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

[StraumliBlight]

An exceedingly rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines [Jun 27]

“The most cost-efficient thing you can do in spaceflight is continue with a heathy spacecraft that is already operating in space," Binzel said.

And that was the plan until the Trump administration released its budget proposal for fiscal year 2026. In its detailed budget information, the White House provided no real rationale for the cancellation, simply stating, "Operating missions that have completed their prime missions (New Horizons and Juno) and the follow-on mission to OSIRIX-REx, OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer, are eliminated."

It's unclear how much of a savings this resulted in. However, Apex is a pittance in NASA's overall budget. The operating funds to keep the mission alive in 2024, for example, were $14.5 million. Annual costs would be similar through the end of the decade. This is less than one-thousandth of NASA's budget, by the way.

"Apex is already on its way to reach Apophis, and to turn it off would be an incredible waste of resources," Binzel said.

Congress, of course, ultimately sets the budget. It will have the final say. But it's clear that NASA's primary mission to study a once-in-a-lifetime asteroid is at serious risk.

[Targeteer]

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/osiris-rex/nasas-bennu-samples-reveal-complex-origins-dramatic-transformation/

NASA’s Bennu Samples Reveal Complex Origins, Dramatic Transformation
Melissa Gaskill
Aug 22, 2025
 
Article

Asteroid Bennu, sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2020, is a mixture of dust that formed in our solar system, organic matter from interstellar space, and pre-solar system stardust. Its unique and varied contents were dramatically transformed over time by interactions with water and exposure to the harsh space environment.

These insights come from a trio of newly published papers based on the analysis of Bennu samples by scientists at NASA and other institutions.

Bennu is made of fragments from a larger parent asteroid destroyed by a collision in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. One of the papers, co-led by Jessica Barnes at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that Bennu’s ancestor was made up of material that had diverse origins—near the Sun, far from the Sun, and even beyond our solar system.

The analyses show that some of the materials in the parent asteroid, despite very low odds, escaped various chemical processes driven by heat and water and even survived the extremely energetic collision that broke it apart and formed Bennu.

“We traced the origins of these initial materials accumulated by Bennu’s ancestor,” said Nguyen. “We found stardust grains with compositions that predate the solar system, organic matter that likely formed in interstellar space, and high temperature minerals that formed closer to the Sun. All of these constituents were transported great distances to the region that Bennu’s parent asteroid formed.”

The chemical and atomic similarities of samples from Bennu, the asteroid Ryugu (sampled by JAXA’s (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 mission) and the most chemically primitive meteorites collected on Earth suggest their parent asteroids may have formed in a similar, distant region of the early solar system. Yet the differences from Ryugu and meteorites that were seen in the Bennu samples may indicate that this region changed over time or did not mix as well as some scientists have thought.
 
We found stardust grains with compositions that predate the solar system, organic matter that likely formed in interstellar space, and high temperature minerals that formed closer to the Sun.

Though some original constituents survived, most of Bennu’s materials were transformed by reactions with water, as reported in the paper co-led by Tom Zega of the University of Arizona and Tim McCoy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington and published in Nature Geoscience. In fact, minerals in the parent asteroid likely formed, dissolved, and reformed over time.

“Bennu’s parent asteroid accumulated ice and dust. Eventually that ice melted, and the resulting liquid reacted with the dust to form what we see today, a sample that is 80% minerals that contain water,” said Zega. “We think the parent asteroid accumulated a lot of icy material from the outer solar system, and then all it needed was a little bit of heat to melt the ice and cause liquids to react with solids.”

Bennu’s transformation did not end there. The third paper, co-led by Lindsay Keller at NASA Johnson and Michelle Thompson of Purdue University, also published in Nature Geoscience, found microscopic craters and tiny splashes of once-molten rock – known as impact melts – on the sample surfaces, signs that the asteroid was bombarded by micrometeorites. These impacts, together with the effects of solar wind, are known as space weathering and occurred because Bennu has no atmosphere to protect it.

“The surface weathering at Bennu is happening a lot faster than conventional wisdom would have it, and the impact melt mechanism appears to dominate, contrary to what we originally thought,” said Keller. “Space weathering is an important process that affects all asteroids, and with returned samples, we can tease out the properties controlling it and use that data and extrapolate it to explain the surface and evolution of asteroid bodies that we haven’t visited.”

As the leftover materials from planetary formation 4.5 billion years ago, asteroids provide a record of the solar system’s history. But as Zega noted, we're seeing that some of these remnants differ from what has been found in meteorites on Earth, because certain types of asteroids burn up in the atmosphere and never make it to the ground. That, the researchers point out, is why collecting actual samples is so important.

“The samples are really crucial for this work,” Barnes said. “We could only get the answers we got because of the samples. It's super exciting that we're finally able to see these things about an asteroid that we've been dreaming of going to for so long.”

The next samples NASA expects to help unravel our solar system’s story will be Moon rocks returned by the Artemis III astronauts.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center provided overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator. The university leads the science team and the mission's science observation planning and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and provided flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace were responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Curation for OSIRIS-REx takes place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. International partnerships on this mission include the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter instrument from the Canadian Space Agency and asteroid sample science collaboration with JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Melissa Gaskill
Johnson Space Center

For more information on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/

[Blackstar]

I guess it's okay if NASA's mission gets canceled, because China wants to do it:

https://spacenews.com/china-proposes-flyby-mission-to-asteroid-apophis-during-2029-earth-encounter/

China proposes flyby mission to asteroid Apophis during 2029 Earth encounter
by Andrew Jones September 9, 2025   

HELSINKI — Chinese scientists are proposing using a pathfinder spacecraft to make a flyby of asteroid Apophis when it makes a close approach to Earth in 2029.

The team behind the concept are proposing a pathfinder spacecraft flyby of asteroid Apophis during its close Earth approach, leveraging a proposed mission to deploy asteroid-spotting spacecraft in Venus-like orbits.

The mission would consist of two small satellites sent into a halo orbit around Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1 to await the approach of Apophis and transfer into a flyby orbit so as to meet the asteroid shortly after its close encounter with the Earth. The asteroid is due to pass within the geosynchronous orbit belt on Friday, April 13, 2029.

The CROWN/Apophis concept tags onto a proposed asteroid surveyor mission. That mission, named CROWN and for which the preliminary design is completed, would consist of six heterogeneous wide-field near-Earth surveyors in Venus-like, heliocentric orbits and proposes to substantially improve the searching and tracking of NEAs. It would, if approved, form part of China’s assets for a planned comprehensive planetary defense program.

The science objectives of CROWN/Apophis, according to Jian-Yang Li of Sun Yat-sen University, who presented the proposal at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) and Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) joint session in Helsinki, Sept. 8, would be to measure the fundamental properties of a potentially hazardous asteroid and the effects of its close encounter with planet Earth. It would aim to observe how movement of material on Apophis is induced, any dust activity, and how it interacts with the terrestrial magnetosphere.

[Blackstar]

https://spacenews.com/american-leadership-at-apophis/

American leadership at Apophis
by Alexander MacDonald, Jim Bell and Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina September 19, 2025   

We are fewer than four years away from what may be the most significant near-Earth asteroid event of the 21st century. On April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis — named for the Egyptian god of chaos — will pass so close to Earth that it will be visible to the naked eye across much of the globe. Nearly a third of a mile wide and weighing over 27 billion kilograms, Apophis will pass just 20,000 miles from Earth — closer than our geosynchronous satellites.

While Apophis poses no immediate danger, it offers an unmatched opportunity to prepare for future threats. Its close approach (on Friday the 13th) will mark a historic near miss. Apophis is just one of thousands of potentially hazardous asteroids that demand our attention. And in terms of projecting global space leadership, the nation that leads at Apophis will be seen as the dominant force in planetary defense.

America has a unique opportunity to lead the world — both in planetary defense and science — by being first to Apophis and collecting unprecedented before-and-after data on how this massive object responds to Earth’s gravity. And in today’s fiscally constrained environment, this leadership can be achieved with virtually no new taxpayer funding — by repurposing existing spacecraft, leveraging past investments, and embracing a public-private model that delivers results.

This American Apophis Strategy rests on two core elements: the OSIRIS-APEX mission and the Apophis Pathfinder mission.

The OSIRIS-APEX mission was approved by NASA in 2022 as an extension of the OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned America’s first asteroid sample. The spacecraft is healthy, operating in solar orbit, and on track to fly by Apophis shortly after its 2029 Earth encounter. Both the House and Senate have identified OSIRIS-APEX for continued support in their FY26 appropriation markups, recognizing its value as a strategic and scientific asset.

The Apophis Pathfinder mission is planning to use the Janus spacecraft — two small asteroid explorers — which were built and flight-qualified by NASA for asteroid flyby missions. The two spacecraft — named Serenity and Mayhem — are ready for use and can be leveraged for a pre-flyby mission to Apophis — complementing OSIRIS-APEX’s post-flyby encounter. This pairing would give the United States unmatched “before and after” data on Apophis’ surface and interior. This kind of comparison has never been done — and could revolutionize how we plan asteroid deflection missions if a future threat emerges.

The Milo Space Science Institute at Arizona State University, along with the University of Colorado at Boulder and Lockheed Martin, responded to a NASA Apophis mission partnership RFI with a joint concept for the mission. The team has pursued creative avenues to fly the mission privately, similar to commercial models employed on NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions that leverage the breadth of the space industry and growth of the space economy, but with the added benefit of being at no additional cost to NASA.

SNIP

For no additional government funds, we can establish a historic and lasting program of asteroid reconnaissance in service of planetary defense. Through the American Apophis Strategy, we would show that America is ready to lead in space once again — and to meet the moment when a truly Earth-threatening asteroid is discovered.

Alexander MacDonald is the former NASA Chief Economist and the author of “The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War.”

Jim Bell is a professor and planetary scientist in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and is the Chief Scientist of ASU’s Milo Space Science Institute. He has been involved as a science team member or camera team leader in over a dozen NASA planetary robotic missions to Mars, the moon, and asteroids. Jim was President of The Planetary Society from 2008 to 2020, and has written many popular science books, including “Hubble Legacy,” “The Interstellar Age” and “The Art of the Cosmos”

Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina is a planetary scientist and Principal Investigator of NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX mission. She develops spacecraft and instruments to investigate hazardous asteroids and the evolution of small, airless worlds.

[Targeteer]

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/osiris-apex/2025/09/23/nasas-osiris-apex-spacecraft-to-slingshot-past-earth/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASASolarSystem&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=863103474

Katy Mersmann
September 23, 2025
Categories
Apophis
OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer)
The Solar System

NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX Spacecraft to Slingshot Past Earth

At 12:56 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 23, NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer) spacecraft will fly within about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) of Earth. Passing about 100 times closer to Earth than the Moon’s orbit, the spacecraft will perform a gravity assist maneuver to alter the spacecraft’s direction and speed. In comparison, satellites in low Earth orbit are typically at altitudes up to about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) above the surface.
Data visualization of Earth with the Moon orbiting, seen from above, so the Moon’s orbit is a perfect circle. OSIRIS-APEX appears from the upper right side, with its trajectory mapped behind it. It flies in, crossing the Moon’s orbit, until it passes just below Earth. It passes Earth just long enough to change its trajectory, exiting the orbit to the upper left. Its trajectory makes a wide checkmark with Earth at the vertex.
OSIRIS-APEX will pass Earth at an altitude of about 2,100 miles.
Credit: NASA/SVS

During OSIRIS-APEX’s encounter with Earth, the spacecraft will use the planet’s gravity to change trajectory and then slingshot back out into space. The Earth gravity assist will change the spacecraft’s velocity in its orbit around the Sun by 15,660 miles per hour (7 kilometers per second) and alter its orbital plane by about 1.5 degrees.

Throughout the approach and gravity assist, OSIRIS-APEX will turn its cameras back toward Earth and the Moon to capture images and collect data that will be used to calibrate the instruments.
More from OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security - Apophis Explorer)

https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/psd/planetary-science-division/2025/APEXEGA.gif?w=1920&h=1080&fit=clip&crop=faces%2Cfocalpoint

[Blackstar]

Interesting comment that when Apophis passes by Earth it will probably shake off material due to Earth gravity.

https://vimeo.com/event/5434602

[Blackstar]

Some discussion about the budget effects:

-they were assuming that they were canceled and had to shut down until two weeks ago. Then they got a reprieve.

-they are losing people across all their levels (described as "erosion") because of concern that there's no future in planetary science.

-they had a leadership development program that was going to give early career people experience in managing a space mission, which would have prepared them to manage future space missions. They had to eliminate that plan.

[StraumliBlight]

Ars Technica: One NASA science mission saved from Trump’s cuts, but others still in limbo [Oct 8]

"We were called for cancellation as part to the president's budget request, and we were reinstated and given a plan to move ahead in FY26 (Fiscal Year 2026) just two weeks ago," said Dani DellaGiustina, principal investigator for OSIRIS-APEX at the University of Arizona. "Our spacecraft appears happy and healthy."

[...]

Although OSIRIS-APEX is again go for Apophis, DellaGiustina said a declining budget has forced some difficult choices. The mission's science team is "basically on hiatus" until some time in 2027, meaning they won't be able to participate in any planning for at least the next year-and-a-half.

This has an outsized effect on younger scientists who were brought on to the mission to train for what the spacecraft will find at Apophis, DellaGiustina said in a meeting Tuesday of the National Academies' Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences.

"We are not anticipating we will have to cut any science at Apophis," she said. But the cuts do effect things like recalibrating the science instruments on the spacecraft, which got dirty and dusty from the mission's brief landing to capture samples from asteroid Bennu in 2020.