Fresh off its historic mission to collect samples from an asteroid in deep space, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has its newest assignment: studying another asteroid during its close encounter with Earth.
OSIRIS-REx ended its seven-year, 4 billion-mile round-trip journey to collect samples from the space rock Bennu in September. But instead of shutting down the craft, the team proposed sending it on a second mission to the asteroid Apophis, expected to pass closer to Earth in 2029 than any other similarly-sized asteroid in recorded history.
They're renaming the spacecraft OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer).