OSIRIS-APEX

The OSIRIS-REx NASA mission, which is spearheaded by scientists at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), made history in 2020 when it successfully touched down on an asteroid named Bennu and collected a sample of rock to bring back to Earth for study. Now the heralded OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is being prepared for a second mission: to the near-Earth asteroid named Apophis, which will come so close to impacting our planet in 2029 that it will be visible to the naked eye. The extended mission has a new name, OSIRIS-APEX, and a new Principal Investigator, Dani DellaGiustina, who started out on the OSIRIS missions as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona.

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