Surpassing expectations, NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX endured a near-Sun passage, outperforming its heat tolerances and remaining intact. As it journeys towards a historic meeting with asteroid Apophis, it has more fiery trials to face, testing its durability and ingenuity.
NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer) spacecraft successfully withstood intense heat last fall as it traveled within 46.5 million miles of the Sun — between the orbits of Mercury and Venus — exceeding its original heat tolerance limits.
On January 23, the mission team completed a thorough review of the data collected during this close solar approach. “There were no surprises, and the spacecraft is operating well,” reported Mike Moreau, deputy project manager for OSIRIS-APEX at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Surviving the Sun’s Proximity
As planned, on September 2, 2024, OSIRIS-APEX reached perihelion, the point in its orbit closest to the Sun. The spacecraft’s journey to asteroid Apophis requires it to travel much closer to the Sun than it was initially designed to withstand. To protect its sensitive components, engineers oriented the spacecraft in a special configuration from August 1 to October 13. This setup used one of its solar arrays as a heat shield, ensuring critical systems remained within safe temperature limits.
While in perihelion configuration, communication with the spacecraft is only possible through one of the spacecraft’s low-gain antennas, thus only very limited data is available to monitor its systems. During this most recent perihelion, there was also a period of several days when no communications were possible while the spacecraft was on the other side of the Sun from Earth.
Health Check and Future Passages
On October 13, the spacecraft exited the perihelion configuration and methodically returned to full operating status, allowing flight engineers to downlink and analyze spacecraft telemetry and assess the health of the system. In November 2024, the spacecraft executed routine checkouts of instrumentation on the spacecraft. OSIRIS-APEX appears to be healthy after the second of six close perihelion passages on its six-year journey to rendezvous with asteroid Apophis.
OSIRIS-APEX successfully passed through its first perihelion earlier in 2024. To reach asteroid Apophis in 2029, the spacecraft must survive four more close encounters with the Sun, the next of which will occur in May 2025.
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