Public Star Night – August 15, 2025 – Insights from OSIRIS-REx and Asteroid Bennu

          Insights from OSIRIS-REx and Asteroid Bennu: What Sample Return Has Revealed and Implications for Remote Measurements of Primitive Asteroids

A special presentation by

Victoria Hamilton, Ph.D.

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 help scientists understand the origin and evolution of our solar system and, ultimately, how life began.  After arriving at Bennu in 2018, the spacecraft gathered data to understand the asteroid and select a sampling site.  A sample was collected in October 2020 and in September of 2023, the sample was successfully returned to Earth. The mission science team has studied numerous aspects of the sample to understand the formation and alteration environments of the asteroid and compare its properties to those of another sample from the asteroid Ryugu. This presentation will review some key early results in these areas and highlight direct comparison to infrared data collected at the asteroid to understand the implications for remote measurements of other asteroids for which we do not have samples.

Dr. Vicky Hamilton 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 science input needed to plan and prioritize NASA’s Mars exploration activities.