A Revolutionary, Low-Cost Asteroid Mission Is Now in Danger From NASA Cutbacks
The proposed national US budget for 2026 contains a few nasty surprises for NASA, and some serious disappointments—among them, the cancellation of a mission titled OSIRIS-APEX, and it's frankly difficult to understand from any perspective.
The move threatens one of the most promising ever opportunities to advance asteroid science, and it undermines an attempt by NASA to actually save money and to get extra value out of existing investments.
Let's talk about OSIRIS, 99942-Apophis, and the future of NASA.
An Impressive Pedigree
OSIRIS-REx was one of NASA's most impressive successes in years. In 2020, it successfully touched down on a near-Earth asteroid called 101955 Bennu, collected a sample , and eventually returned the material to Earth for study. It's the sort of idea we write about at ExtremeTech with fair regularity, and which only sometimes comes to fruition.
The mission had some hiccups, including one incident upon landing in which the mission was very nearly swallowed by Bennu itself. Still, everything proceeded as planned, and the sample was opened in October of 2023. It revealed organic compounds and some undiscovered materials, all of which are still in need of further study. Regardless, having delivered its payload, OSIRIS-REx was still fully operational—and so, NASA re-christened it OSIRIS-APEX, for "APophis EXplorer." Apophis is a larger asteroid than Bennu and flies close to the Earth roughly every eight years. NASA scientists had realized that the OSIRIS lander's trajectory could be adjusted to intersect with that of Apophis, and potentially extract extra value from the program by studying two asteroids for (very nearly) the price of one.
An Unusually Large Flyby
Apophis is more than 300 meters across, at least when seen from some angles, and in 2029 it will fly just 31,000 km from the Earth. A flyby that close, of an object that large, only comes around once every 7,500 years, or so. The danger of an impact is continent-level—not a "planet killer" but a very big threat, nonetheless. There was a short-lived period where NASA believed it could still veer toward Earth by 2036, but that worry has come and gone.
The OSIRIS experiment was perfectly suited to studying Apophis, and it was already in space. Upon arrival, it was to enter a close orbit and use thrusters to blast off sections of asteroid dust. It would then use its various tools for spectral analysis to analyze the rock revealed beneath. And it would do all this for less than a tenth of the cost of launching the lander in the first place.
Confident that such a penny-pinching approach couldn't possibly go wrong, NASA "re-vectored" the lander toward the meeting point and began planning for what to do with all that data.
Budget Woes
It's not uncommon for a White House administration to interfere with NASA's best-laid plans through funding cuts, but this particular cutback was bewildering to insiders. Not only does the Apophis mission cost a paltry $14.5 million per year as an addition to an $800 million original investment, but it could beat out $200 million alternatives.
OSIRIS-REx actually touched down on an asteroid -- instead, APEX would blast with thrusters, then assay remotely.Credit: NASA
Richard Binzel, an asteroid expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Ars Technica that "Apex is already on its way to reach Apophis, and to turn it off would be an incredible waste of resources."
The budget does propose to support some NASA initiatives—by refocusing agency's mission objectives on "beating China" back to the Moon, and on Elon Musk's personal hobby-horse of putting an astronaut on Mars.
The same budget also notes that it will cut a "grossly over-budget" mission for sample return from Mars—how a manned mission would manage to be less grossly over-budget, one can only speculate.
"NASA's primary role is space exploration," the budget argues, "and, similar to prior generations that were inspired by the Apollo lunar landings, NASA will inspire the next generation of explorers through exciting, ambitious space missions, not through subsidizing woke STEM programming and research that prioritizes some groups of students over others."
A Big Old Waste
The frustrating thing about the potential cancellation of OSIRIS-APEX is the program's affordability, more so than its direct scientific potential. It will be to do subsurface scans of the common chondrite type of asteroid, but it will arguably provide less insight than the original mission, which collected a physical sample.
NASA scientists have been sounding off for some time about seemingly arbitrary cuts, ones that don't seem aimed at the savings of true austerity. True austerity looks at both costs and benefits—but, increasingly, NASA is being cut with little attention to the impact, at all.
