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