OSIRIS-Rex Approaches Asteroid Bennu — Credit Lockheed Martin

Insights from Asteroid Bennu: What OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Has Revealed.

Is the subject of this month’s Estes Valley Astronomical Society (EVAS) meeting. EVAS in conjunction with The Estes Park Memorial Observatory is offering a free public open house/star night on Saturday, August 30th 2025. The goal of EVAS is to promote amateur astronomy and education in the Estes valley.

The primary objective of NASA’s Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission is to explore and return a pristine sample from the asteroid Bennu to advance our understanding of the origin and evolution of our solar system and, ultimately, how life began. After arriving at Bennu in 2018, OSIRIS-REx mapped the mineralogy and geology of the asteroid and selected a sampling site. The sample was collected in October 2020 and successfully returned to Earth in September of 2023. The mission science team has studied the sample in depth to understand the formation and alteration environments of the asteroid and compare its properties to those of a sample from the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Haybusa2 mission. My presentation will review some key early results and highlight direct comparisons of infrared data on the sample to that collected at the asteroid to understand the implications for remote measurements of other asteroids for which we do not have samples.

Dr. Vicky Hamilton Southwest Research Institute

Our returning speaker this month is Dr. Vicky Hamilton. She is an Institute Scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University and her A.B. from Occidental College. She is a geologist specializing in laboratory spectroscopy of minerals, meteorites, and returned samples, numerical modeling of infrared spectra, and infrared remote sensing of planetary surfaces to determine composition and physical properties. She has been a science team Co-Investigator and Deputy Instrument Scientist/Principal Investigator on NASA planetary science flight missions to Mars and asteroids, including Mars Global Surveyor, 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Science Laboratory, OSIRIS-REx, and Lucy. She is also the Chair of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), a research community-based, interdisciplinary forum providing the scientific input needed to plan and prioritize NASA’s Mars exploration activities.

The observatory is just north of the high school at 1600 Manford Ave. Park in the teacher’s parking lot between the high school and the observatory. The doors will open at 7:00 pm and the meeting will start at 7:30 pm. The presentation, including a question and answer period, lasts about an hour. After the presentation, weather permitting, we will look through our new 16-inch dome telescope at various celestial objects.

Estes Park Memorial Observatory

Information about the meeting can be found on the observatory website at: www.AngelsAbove.Org.