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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Published: 31 May 2024

Webinar with Amy Simon (NASA, GSFC, USA)

recorded on May 30, 2024

Game Changers Online Seminar

From OSIRIS-REx to OSIRIS APEX: Mission Results and Future Exploration

Online Seminar with Amy Simon (NASA, GSFC, USA)

In September 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx returned an amazing 121 grams of regolith from near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu. To successfully collect the sample, the mission had to carefully navigate the microgravity environment while also collecting important information about Bennu’s surface. These data provided the high-resolution mapping of the surface that enabled autonomous natural feature tracking during sample collection, while also collecting surface composition information.

Abstract

This talk discusses the mission’s engineering challenges and successes, remote sensing results, and early results from sample analysis. The talk concludes with a summary of what’s next for the spacecraft as it heads to a new target, near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis.

Recorded Webinar

About the Speaker

Amy Simon is a senior scientist for planetary atmospheres research at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which she joined in 2001. She is the OSIRIS-REX Visible and Infrared Spectrometer instrument scientist and is the Project Scientist for OSIRIS APEX.

She has over 170 scientific publications and is also the PI of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, observing each of the outer planets on a yearly cadence. She was the 2023 recipient of the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences Claudia Alexander Prize.

History

Starting in the summer of 2020, the International Space Science Institute has organized the weekly on-line seminar series called “Game Changers”. After six series of weekly talks on the themes of “Missions that Changed the Game in Solar System, Astrophysics and Earth Sciences” , “Ideas and Findings about the Solar System, the Universe and our Terrestrial Environment”, “Habitability – From Cosmic to Microbial Scales”, “Viewing Earth from Space – the Changing Environment and Climate of our Planet”, and “Captivating Cosmology: From the Big Bang to Tomorrow” and the topic “Space Environmental Hazards: Mitigation and Prediction”, the webinar series continues on a monthly basis.

Credits ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Martel