This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel. Behind the Black, Bob Zimmerman is here. Once upon a time,

Osiris Rex, a long development and then a great success. The asteroid Benu, a sample, returned to Earth,

and yet Osiris Rex transforms itself. Bob's here to report on Osiris Apex.

Bob, what is Osiris Apex?

What is it done?

It's on its way.

They renamed it, I think that's dumb, but they renamed it for its new mission.

After it sent its samples back to Earth, they repurposed it to go to the potentially dangerous asteroid

Apophis when it does a flyby of Earth in 29, April of 29.

And so it's on the way to Apophis, and in the process of doing so,

it has to make six relatively close flybys of the sun. These flybys are not super duper close. They

don't go within the orbit of Mercury, but they go within the orbit of Venus, and the spacecraft

is not designed to get that close to the sun. And so it did second of six flybys in September,

and when it does so, they had to improvise. They use the solar panels.

They orient the spacecraft to use the solar panels to shield its instruments from

the sun's heat and light.

In doing so, that means they do not have much communications with the spacecraft.

It basically is shut down.

And so after it completed the flyby, it has taken several months to analyze the data, to get the data from the spacecraft, and to analyze it to make sure everything is functioning.

And they've now reviewed all the data.

Last week they announced that the spacecraft is functional.

Everything is fine after that second of six flybys. And the improvisations they came up with worked. Now, everything's fine after that second of six flybys.

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