
Copernical Team
NASA astronauts Moghbeli and O'Hara embark on rare all-female spacewalk

Body’s defence in space

ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen is taking part in an experiment to understand how the body’s immune system handles the new environment.
China places multipurpose satellite into space

New scientific experimental samples from China's space station return to Earth

NRL ISS Mission seeks new bioinspired materials

Mars Climate Sounder data reveals new cloud trends, study shows

Estimating depositional timing on Mars using cosmogenic radionuclide data

Innovative three legged landing system tested for small body exploration

Heterogeneity of Earth's mantle may be relics of Moon formation

OSIRIS-REx flies on as OSIRIS-APEX to explore its second asteroid

After seven years in space and over 4 billion miles traveled, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully collected and delivered the first U.S. sample from a near-Earth asteroid. Yet, after all this time and travel, the spacecraft will not retire.
Instead, NASA extended the University of Arizona-led mission so that the spacecraft can be used to study another near-Earth asteroid named Apophis. The mission was renamed OSIRIS-APEX, short for OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer. An overview of the mission was published in The Planetary Science Journal.
OSIRIS-REx deputy principal investigator Dani DellaGiustina is now the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-APEX mission.
Twenty minutes after dropping the sample high above Earth's atmosphere on Sept. 24, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to put it on course to rendezvous with Apophis in 5½ years—just after Apophis makes its own close approach to Earth.