Teams Rehearse OSIRIS-REx Launch Countdown

Launch and mission controllers are at their consoles this afternoon in a dress rehearsal for the upcoming launch of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Goddard Space Flight Center, United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin all are participating in today’s test.

OSIRIS-REx is sealed inside the payload fairing and already in place atop the rocket at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch team is based at the Atlas Spaceflight Operations Center a few miles south of the launch site.

Photo credit: NASA/ Dimitri Gerondidakis

About the OSIRIS-REx Mission

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, delivered rocks and dust from asteroid Bennu to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. The pristine material from Bennu – which the spacecraft collected from the asteroid's surface in 2020 – will offer generations of scientists a window into the time when the Sun and planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago. After its sample delivery, OSIRIS-REx continued on to a new mission to asteroid Apophis, and was renamed OSIRIS-APEX (OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer). Learn more about the OSIRIS-REx mission.