The Maple Leaf on Bennu: Canada's Participation on the OSIRIS-REx Mission

Launched in September 2016, OSIRIS-REx is a NASA-led mission to return a pristine sample of asteroid Bennu back to Earth in 2023. The OSIRIS-REx team has been investigating Bennu since the spacecraft's arrival in December 2018 in an effort to select a site from which to collect a sample in July 2020.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA), in collaboration with its academic and industrial partners, have made several contributions to the mission. The OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA) represents the Canadian hardware element on the spacecraft. Built by MDA Corporation and with a science team led by York University, OLA is a scanning lidar instrument used to generate a three-dimensional topographic representation of Bennu's surface.

OLA has fired over 1 billion individual laser pulses at the asteroid, producing a global shape model at a horizontal resolution of approximately one point every 7 cm. These data are important for (i) providing morphological context to interpret geochemical and geophysical data produced by the other instruments onboard the spacecraft and (ii) aiding in the identification of potential sampling sites.

In addition to contributing OLA, the CSA is supporting several co-investigators from Canadian institutions to participate on the mission's science team. Canadian-led investigations include studies of Bennu's spectral and geophysical properties, along with laboratory experiments to better constrain Bennu's physical and dielectric properties and its mineralogical and geochemical composition.

In exchange for its contributions, Canada will receive 4% of the sample returned from Bennu. It is anticipated that a portion of the Canadian-owned sample will be made available for investigations in Canada and around the world to facilitate scientific discoveries for generations to come.