Members of the OSIRIS-REx science team will be honored during Saturday’s football game at Arizona Stadium, a little over a month after they scored a spectacular touchdown of their own.
The Wildcats will wear an OSIRIS-REx decal on their helmets during their game against the 11th-ranked Oregon State Beavers, and a video tribute to the NASA asteroid sampling mission will be played at halftime.
The video will come with a code fans can scan with their phones to access an augmented reality experience.
The University of Arizona football team will wear this helmet decal during Saturday's game against Oregon State.
Then Regents’ Professor and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta and his team of scientists will be brought onto the field to celebrate the successful return of samples from the asteroid Bennu on Sept. 24.
The event will double as a change-of-command ceremony for the robotic spacecraft, which is now on its way to another near-Earth asteroid named Apophis. U of A assistant professor Dani DellaGiustina is the principal investigator in charge of that extended, 6-year mission.
Lauretta will officially pass the baton to her at halftime on Saturday.
“We’re kind of making it a new tradition,” he said of the change-of-command ceremony. “It’s a tradition in the military, so we’re kind of copying that idea.”
NASA approved the $200 million mission to Apophis last year.
As soon as OSIRIS-REx released its return capsule filled with rocks and dust from Bennu and steered away from Earth on Sept. 24, the spacecraft became known as the OSIRIS Apophis Explorer, or OSIRIS-APEX for short, with DellaGiustina in command.
