Full Resolution Derek Nelson gets ready to depart. He's headed to Lockheed-Martin in Denver, where he and the rest of his group at KinetX will be doing navigation for OSIRIS-REx.
While we are of course excited by New Horizons and talk about nothing else, there are other spacecraft in the solar system. By coincidence with our January 1 2019 flyby of Ultima Thule, OSIRIS did its first orbit insertion burn at asteroid Bennu on the very same day! It was a huge accomplishment for that mission.
Derek:"Bennu is just so small, a completely different realm than even MU69. I mean, it's 500 meters, and OSIRIS is going to be orbiting it. I like to think of it as a turtle orbiting a small building. The speed is about right -- just a few centimeters per second."
