Remember OSIRIS-REx? Her NEW Designation will be... OSIRIS-APEX! And She Will Dazzle Us All, Come 2029.

As I type this, the gracefully-demure craft, now loaded with surface-, and sub-surface samples. . . is racing speedily away from Bennu (per our prior posts, there) -- after firing its main engine, last May, to head toward home -- this very lil' blue dot we're all on.

And now, since every single bit of this mission has been a wild success, the NASA big-wigs just "green-lit" an extension -- to late 2029, minimum. Before all that (still a daunting task, to be sure -- traversing some 183,914,048 miles, since May 2021) she needs to get safely back by home, and gently drop that Bennu sample pack to the Earth's surface, by parachute.

Then it will turn outward, and onward, away from our "capture velocity" gravitational forces, and set a bold top-sail -- for Apophis, a little more than small mountain-sized rock -- that next makes a close approach to Earth by mid-2029. By then, OSIRIS will have chased onward, behind it, in a gently arching loop. . . so that it may approach at nearly walking speed, so as not disturb the micro-gravity there. . . and study it for several months (as she did Benu, a decade earlier, by then -- or so it is hoped).

We likely won't get a sample return, from Apophis, as I think we are just fresh out of canistersonboard OSIRIS-, but she will graze the surface, and blow some dust away -- to get a good look at the Apophis sub-surface composition. Exciting stuff, out of Goddard, overnight, per Phys.org -- more soon (when I get time, in a separate posting):

. . ."Apophis is one of the most infamous asteroids," DellaGiustina said. "When it was first discovered in 2004, there was concern that it would impact the Earth in 2029 during its close approach. That risk was retired after subsequent observations, but it will be the closest an asteroid of this size has gotten in the 50 or so years asteroids have been closely tracked, or for the next 100 years of asteroids we have discovered so far. It gets within one-tenth the distance between the Earth and moon during the 2029 encounter. People in Europe and Africa will be able to see it with the naked eye, that's how close it will get. . . .

We were stoked to find out the mission was extended. . . ."

Stoked, indeed! But to be clear, it poses no collision risk, to Earth. It offers a window (like Bennu, the samples of which will have been fully analyzed by 2029) into what the primordial local star systems, and their respective host-galaxies. . . congealed into. Can't. . . wait!

नमस्ते