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NASA Invites Media to New OSIRIS-REx, Asteroid Bennu Study Briefing

Aug. 9, 2021

Still depicting the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s trajectory around asteroid Bennu from the initial arrival in Dec 2018 through the final departure in April 2021. The trajectory is presented in a Sun Bennu North reference frame.

Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

The mission spent over two years with Bennu, gathering information about its size, shape, mass, and composition while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory.

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT) Wednesday, Aug. 11, to discuss an important finding from NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft.

OSIRIS-REx spent over two years near the asteroid Bennu, which is a third of a mile (500 meters) wide. During that time, the spacecraft gathered information about Bennu’s size, shape, mass, and composition while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory. Before leaving the near-Earth object May 10, 2021, the spacecraft scooped up a sample of rock and dust from the asteroid’s surface. OSIRIS-REx will return the sample to Earth Sept. 24, 2023, for further scientific study.

Audio of the teleconference will stream live online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/live

Participants in the briefing will be:

Dante Lauretta, study co-author and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson
Davide Farnocchia, study lead author and scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California
Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington

For more information about the OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex