Been a good long while since I’ve talked about anything space related here, but I felt like it would be bad form not to mention today’s successful landing of a sample capsule containing material pulled from the surface of the asteroid Bennu back in 2020. This marks the completion of the primary goal of the spacecraft which, now renamed OSIRIS-APex (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Apophis Explorer) leaves near-Earth space once again on a trip to the asteroid Apophis.
It feels like an eternity since the missions launch back in 2016 — an event I covered back when I still wrote heavily about space and rocketry here. I’ve followed the mission for its major milestones and am quite pleased that the sample return capsule landed without issue, unopened and undamaged, and that we now have a sample of what is effectively proto-planetary material to study. Obviously not something we will find on Earth, such a mission is, as it stands, the only way to gather material to actually study up close, and it was, and will continue to be, one hell of a mission even beyond this sample return: We gathered incredible data in the spacecrafts nearly 2 year mission around Bennu and I eagerly await the missions arrival at Apophis in 2029 to see what we can learn there.
That’s really all there is to say right now: As is my method now I’m keeping things short and sweet. If you want to read up more on the missiion, as always, here’s the Wikipedia entry as a primer.
More to come as always.
