NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft today moved a step closer to starting a voyage to explore an uncharted world in our solar system — the mountain-sized Asteroid Bennu — by joining the booster rocket that will propel it from Earth next week.
At Cape Canaveral’s Vertical Integration Facility, adjacent to the Complex 41 launch pad, workers with United Launch Alliance stacked the Atlas 5 rocket that will propel NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on its voyage to Asteroid Bennu.
Running through a practice countdown to check systems before launching a NASA sample-return probe to Asteroid Bennu in exactly two weeks, an Atlas 5 successfully completed its Wet Dress Rehearsal today.
Take a walk around NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft less than three weeks before its Sept. 8 launch on top of an Atlas 5 rocket. Rich Kuhns, the mission’s program manager from Lockheed Martin, points out some of the major features on the probe.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is about to be sealed inside the nose fairing of its Atlas 5 rocket booster for a seven-year voyage to asteroid Bennu and back to Earth on a mission to seek out clues to the origin of life and the chaotic early solar system.
Five years after winning $1 billion from NASA to mount the first U.S. asteroid sample return mission, scientists and engineers will get their last look at the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft this week as it is closed up inside the nose cone of an Atlas 5 rocket for launch in September.
Watch the pre-flight news conference that introduces NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on Sept. 8. It will capture a sample of Asteroid Bennu for return to Earth.
At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, workers have finished the pre-launch assembly and fueling of OSIRIS-REx for the asteroid sample return spacecraft for liftoff Sept. 8.
Dante Lauretta, a researcher based at the University of Arizona, leads the science team on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission scheduled for launch Sept. 8 on a round-trip journey to asteroid Bennu.
It is a rocket like no other, a vehicle with a single solid-fuel booster mounted to its side, that will launch NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe next month to bring back a sample of Asteroid Bennu.