So OSIRIS-REx is a mission of discovery to the primitive building blocks
that we think made our planet so special billions of years ago.
We’re going back in time to measure, touch, taste and feel the kind of object that
we think seeded our planet with the chemical building blocks that may have led to life.
And those questions have been on our minds, literally, for generations on this planet.
The robotic mission will first map the asteroid in exquisite detail, and then
touch and high five the asteroid with a landerless landing to bring back the first samples from a planetary object since Apollo brought back samples from the moon in 1972.
When those samples come back to Earth they’ll be spread across the laboratory basis of scientific research on the planet.
All the future women and men science leaders of the planet will have these samples to look at this kind of object throughout time –
how it connects to us, life and the whole universe.
That’s OSIRIS-REx.