The spacecraft that brought Bennu's samples home never landed. Having released its capsule towards Utah in September 2023, it fired its engines twenty minutes later and set off on an entirely new mission, renamed OSIRIS-APEX for its new target.
That target is Apophis, an asteroid roughly 340 metres across that will pass within about 32,000 kilometres of Earth in April 2029 — closer than the geostationary satellites, and visible to the naked eye from parts of Europe and Africa. It briefly held the highest impact risk rating ever assigned before further observations ruled out a collision for at least a century.
The scientific opportunity is the encounter itself. Passing that close to Earth, Apophis will be squeezed and stretched by tidal forces, and planetary scientists expect the surface to be measurably disturbed — landslides, shifting boulders, possibly seismic shaking. Watching it happen from close range is a natural experiment in how rubble-pile asteroids respond to stress.
The spacecraft will arrive shortly after the flyby and settle into orbit, surveying the changes and eventually descending to disturb the surface with its thrusters — a substitute for the sampling arm, whose collection head went home with the capsule.
It is a good illustration of how extended missions have become the quiet backbone of planetary exploration. A healthy spacecraft with fuel remaining is an enormous asset, and reusing one costs a fraction of building another; Dawn, Deep Impact, Stardust, New Horizons and Hayabusa2 all had second lives of this kind.
