Denver Business Journal 12/3/2018 By Greg Avery
Another Colorado-built space probe has reached its destination, this one catching up to an an asteroid after 509 million miles of flight over 27 months.
NASA's Osiris-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin Space in Jefferson County, on Monday slowed itself to 61,300 mph to fly alongside the asteroid Bennu — a key milestone in a 4.4 billion-mile round-trip flight to return some of Bennu's material to earth.
Crews flying the spacecraft for Lockheed Martin Space at its Jefferson County campus control center sent the final flight trajectory adjustments, and NASA declared the craft arrived Monday morning.
The Osiris-REx spacecraft will spend the next 20 months flying within 4.5 miles of Bennu, allowing detailed examinations, among the first will be done by a team of University of Colorado-Boulder researchers calculating the asteroid's mass.
The mission's formal name is the Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, shortened to Osiris-REx.
It's primary mission is to help planetary scientists research the development of the solar system by studying the 492-meter-wide asteroid, which was named Bennu after a mythological Egyptian deity by a third-grader who won a NASA naming contest.
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