Media Briefing Today on OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Stow

Oct. 29, 2020

Media Briefing Today on OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Stow

What: Media briefing to provide update on the OSIRIS-REx mission's work to safely stow the sample it collected from asteroid Bennu
When: Today, Oct. 29, at 1 p.m. Arizona time (4 p.m EDT)
Where: For dial-in information, media must send their name, affiliation and phone number to Alana Johnson at alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov no later than 12:30 Arizona time (3:30 p.m. EDT) today.

NASA will host a media teleconference to provide an update on the status of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and the University of Arizona-led mission's work to safely stow the sample it collected from asteroid Bennu.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a dramatic six-second touch of Bennu on Oct. 20, and video released the next day indicated a significant amount of particles were agitated on Bennu's surface and collected in the spacecraft's Touch-And-Go Sample Arm Mechanism collector head. The team has been working since to stow the primordial cargo for return to Earth next year.

During the teleconference, OSIRIS-REx team members will discuss how the stowage process has gone, what else they have learned about the sample, and what the next steps are for the mission to return the sample to Earth. The teleconference audio and visuals will stream live at http://www.nasa.gov/live.

Briefing participants include:

Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, University of Arizona, Tucson
Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx mission operations manager, Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, Colorado

For dial-in information, media must send their name, affiliation and phone number to Alana Johnson at alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov no later than 12:30 Arizona time (3:30 p.m. EDT) today.

Studying Bennu with OSIRIS-REx allows researchers to learn more about the origins of our solar system, the sources of water and organic molecules on Earth, and the hazards and resources in near-Earth space.

For more information on OSIRIS-REx, visit https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex and https://www.asteroidmission.org.

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Media contact:
Erin Morton
OSIRIS-REx
520-269-2493
morton@orex.lpl.arizona.edu

The University of Arizona, a land-grant university with two independently accredited medical schools, is one of the nation's top 40 public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report. Established in 1885, the university is widely recognized as a student-centric university and has been designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education. The university ranked in the top 20 in 2018 in research expenditures among all public universities, according to the National Science Foundation, and is a leading Research 1 institution with $687 million in annual research expenditures. The university advances the frontiers of interdisciplinary scholarship and entrepreneurial partnerships as a member of the Association of American Universities, the 65 leading public and private research universities in the U.S. It benefits the state with an estimated economic impact of $4.1 billion annually. For the latest on the University of Arizona response to the novel coronavirus, visit the university's COVID-19 webpage.