It seems that Osiris-APEX will enter orbit around 99942 Apophis only eight days after the asteroid's close approach to Earth in April 2029, and stay there for up to 18 months. I wonder if the mission team will get the chance to photograph Apophis and Earth at the same time? That would be cool

Live - Osiris-Rex first results here when they finally get past all the speeches:

 

I was just about to post it. You beat me to it. 🙂

Latest update with a few surprises:

https://www.science.org/content/article/pristine-asteroid-samples-offer-window-early-solar-system

Edited December 14, 20232 yr by dmwalker

Quote

 

The diversity of organic compounds it contains will help researchers understand how complex space-based chemistry got billions of years ago—and whether asteroids crashing into an infant Earth might have given life a head start.

But under an electron microscope, the reflective white material looked more like a skin or crust around some of the samples. “It’s fractured and broken,” Lauretta said. And when researchers shined light on it and studied the spectrum it reflected, they saw no sign of calcium carbonate at all. Instead, there were peaks in magnesium, sodium, and phosphate, and signs of carbon and organic molecules. “I’ve been looking at meteorites for a long time and I’ve never come across anything like that,” he said. Like carbonate, the white mineral probably formed with the help of water. The team also detected simple ringed hydrocarbons, such as benzene, evaporating from the samples. The search for amino acids and other complex organic molecules has not yet yielded results.

 

 

Fascinating stuff.