This Sunday is a big day. OSIRIS-REx, deep space probe, will be returning a sample from an asteroid to Earth. I’ll be watching, along with many others.
The OSIRIS-REx mission, though, has a deeper story that’s largely untold. I’d like to tell it to you now.
the setup
OSIRIS-REx: a space probe, tasked with travelling to the asteroid Bennu, taking a sample, and returning it to Earth. It all sounded straightforward… until the probe reached Bennu.
Bennu, it turns out, is a “rubble pile” asteroid, made of a bunch of rocks held together only by gravity. The problem for OSIRIS-REx was that there was no clear place for the probe to collect its sample. They hadn’t counted on all the rocks.
So NASA called in us. The “citizens”. I, along with numerous other volunteers, mapped out the surface from images taken by the probe, marking every rock, boulder, and crater. Myself, I mapped just over 49,000 square meters of the surface, including Nightingale, the sample site that was eventually chosen.
citizen science
Citizen science: it’s the idea that some scientific challenges can best be overcome when many people come together, even people who don’t have any scientific training. To me, it’s a wonderful picture of everyone, from different nations and cultures and professions and backgrounds, working together to advance a common goal.
The best part of the project was the community. More than 3,500 of us participated. We griped together about the frustratingly repetitive job of marking every tiny rock large, seemingly-endless images, but once we had finished, many of us expressed nostalgia. We wanted another Bennu to map!
I miss those days.
I marked my images while my dad read to me from Les Misérables. It gave me something to do and something to think about, all while I spent time with someone I loved.
All good things must come to an end. We celebrated those (including myself) who’d mapped sample sites, the organizers sent swag to people. They even sent gifts to me, living all the way over in Malaysia. I still have the OSIRIS-REx mission patch as a sticker on my water bottle, front and center.
conclusion; or so we thought
We finished in October 2019. The very end of a world that would soon change forever. (You know, of course, what 2020 brought.)
We forgot—nay, I should only speak for myself. I forgot. I forgot those days, only reminded occasionally when someone asked about the sticker on my water bottle.
Then, one of my brother’s classmates who also loves following space exploration mentioned OSIRIS-REx, that it would be returning with its sample this Sunday, the 24rd.
I remembered.
the untold story
First I looked at the OSIRIS-REx Wikipedia page. I read it all the way through.
It never mentioned us. The thirty-five hundred. Not once. It just says that “NASA selected the final four candidate sites.”
I looked at the Bennu page—perhaps we were mentioned there instead, as the mappers of the asteroid. Nothing.
Maybe they’ve forgotten about us. Maybe we weren’t as important as we thought we were.
I still remember us. So, as a storyteller, I did my job: I told the untold story.
the real conclusion
We’ll be watching on Sunday, when OSIRIS-REx returns. We’ll be watching, us 3,500.
We collectively marked fourteen million surface features, combing over the entire asteroid’s surface fifteen times.
We’ll be watching. And we’ll remember, whether they do or not.
We’ll celebrate, we’ll laugh, and we’ll tell people our story. The story the world seems to have forgotten, or perhaps never known.
We’ll be watching.
