OSIRIS-APEX emerged “unscathed” from its closest ever brush around our sun on January 2, scientists announced on Tuesday (May 28).
Probe, originally known as OSIRIS-RExit has completed its sample return mission to asteroid Bennu and is now headed for the space rock Apophis on an extended mission. This new mission requires OSIRIS-APEX to glide 25 million miles (40 million kilometers) closer to the Sun than before. designed to operate. Scientists believe several such close flybys are necessary to get the probe on its way to Apophis in 2029.
OSIRIS-APEX is in an elliptical orbit around our Sun, bringing it to its closest point to the star once every nine months. His first such close approach occurred on January 2. To prepare for the intense burst of radiation, in early December the mission team tucked one of OSIRIS-APEX’s two solar arrays so that eclipsed the probe’s most sensitive instrumentswhile the other panel was facing the sun to power the spacecraft.
Related: How NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will help protect Earth from asteroid Bennu and its flyby in 2182
This piece of creative engineering protected the spacecraft during its perilously close approach to the Sun, just as computer simulations previously predicted, the mission team shared this week in NASA statement.
“It’s phenomenal how well our spacecraft configuration protected OSIRIS-APEX, so I’m really encouraged by this first close perihelion flyby,” said Ron Mink, mission systems engineer for OSIRIS-APEX at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Telemetry data downloaded from the probe in mid-March reassured scientists of its good health. According to a NASA statement, in early April, the probe got far enough from the Sun to resume normal operations.
The scientists and engineers were also pleasantly surprised to find that the onboard camera performed even better than expected after being exposed to high temperatures during the encounter. MapCam, a medium-range camera that previously mapped Bennu in color and will also map Apophis, has seen a 70% reduction in cumbersome white spots called hot pixels since the camera was last tested in April last year.
Hot pixels are caused by prolonged exposure to sunlight and are a common problem with cameras in space. While they are normally resolved by controlled heat using on-board heaters, the OSIRIS-APEX camera recovered naturally due to a surge of heat from a nearby solar encounter, the researchers said.
Mission team members are relieved that OSIRIS-APEX is safe after its first close approach to the Sun, noting that it is unclear how five more such encounters might affect the probe and its instruments.
The next closest approach to the Sun is scheduled for Sept. 1, when the probe will fly again to within 46.5 million miles (74.8 million km) of the Sun’s surface, deep within the orbit of Venus and well beyond the probe’s originally anticipated operating limits. .