Tag Archives: York University

Just days ahead of a spacecraft landing on Bennu, a newly released model of the asteroid shows a complex history – including the fact that its surface regolith might have expanded and contracted at least once.

The NASA led OSIRIS-REx mission is exceeding scientists expectations and now they have to make the difficult decision of where to land the spacecraft from four candidate sites on asteroid Bennu to collect samples.

Before the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in orbit around asteroid Bennu can take a sample from the surface it needs to be mapped. That’s where Canada’s OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA) comes in.

In the early evening of January 25 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a panel of experts provided an introduction, update and context of Canada’s participation in the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission.

Last week the Department of Defence (DND) announced 160 contracts valued at $26.8M for 16 science and technology challenge areas which included 20+ contracts for space organizations.

The first results are in from the OSIRIS-REx mission and they couldn’t please researchers more. Asteroid Bennu is everything they had hoped it would be based on the data obtained so far. It also has provided a few surprises.

Astronaut David Saint-Jacques spent the first couple of days getting used to his new temporary home but is now hard at work.

On Friday, August 24th NASA hosted a media teleconference on the OSIRIS-REx mission which will return an asteroid sample to Earth. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is now preparing to conduct approach maneuvers as it heads for a December 3rd rendezvous with asteroid Bennu.

The Canadian Space Agency has awarded three contracts to universities related to last years Space Exploration Science Maturation Study and a robotic technology contract to MDA.

In this weeks SpaceQ podcast I spoke with Dr. Michael Daly, Associate Professor at York University about the international, though NASA led, Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer mission, or as it’s commonly called, OSIRIS-REx.