---
title: "NASA Asteroid Sampler Osiris-Rex Coming Together at Lockheed"
description: "Lockheed Martin has begun putting together the component pieces of NASA's Osiris-Rex asteroid-sampling probe slated to launch in 2016."
date: "2015-04-10"
modified: "2015-08-13"
authors:
  - name: "Matthew Lincoln"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/justmatt"
url: "https://futurism.com/nasa-asteroid-sampler-osiris-rex-coming-together-at-lockheed"
categories:
  - "NASA"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "space"
---

# NASA Asteroid Sampler Osiris-Rex Coming Together at Lockheed

![Default Futurism featured image](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Futurism-Filler-Image.jpg>)

- “The spacecraft structure has been integrated with the propellant tank and propulsion system and is ready to begin system integration in the Lockheed Martin highbay,” Mike Donnelly, Osiris-Rex project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
- Osiris-Rex is set to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in late 2016 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. The spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid Bennu around 2018 and descend to its surface to collect at least a 60-gram sample, which the craft will return to Earth in 2023.
- Osiris-Rex was selected in 2010 as the fourth in NASA’s New Horizons series of competitively awarded, medium-size planetary science missions.