UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-Rex) mission is the United States’ first to collect a sample from an asteroid and deliver it to Earth for study. The mission launched on Sept. 8, 2016. The spacecraft reached the asteroid Bennu in 2018, collected a sample late in 2020, and is now bringing it back to Earth for an anticipated delivery of Sept. 24, 2023.
Katherine Freeman, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences, will give an overview of the mission, the asteroid and the state-of-the-art methods Penn State brings to the mission in her talk "Preparing for the OSIRIS-REx Sample Return" at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 20. The talk, which is free and open to the public, takes place in 112 Walker Building.
Christopher House, professor of geosciences, and Allison Baczynski, associate research professor of geosciences, are also part of the research team. As part of the Participating Scientist Program, the team will measure the abundances of stable isotopes in organic matter and organic molecules contained within the samples. Their work will help scientists learn about the formation of the solar system and about molecules that may have contributed to the development of life on Earth.
Freeman’s talk is part of EESI’s Spring 2023 EarthTalks speaker series, “Exploration of our Solar System.” We now live in the golden age of solar system exploration. With a dozen NASA missions currently in development — as well as spacecraft actively on Mars, near Jupiter, and in the Kuiper belt — the current scale of mission activity is unprecedented and brings forth a new era of comparative study of varied worlds at the systems level. The series is intended to provide a venue for the expansion of participant’s horizons into our solar system.
The EESI EarthTalks series is supported by Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. Talks are also available via Zoom. For more information about the Spring 2023 series, visit the EarthTalks web page.