Dante Loretta

That's my fault, by the way.

I came up with all that.

So every letter of the mission name spells out part of the science investigation.

And what really drives us is this origin science, going back to those big questions that I first thought about as an undergraduate here at U of A. Where did we come from?

And this asteroid, it tells part of that story.

It's ancient.

It's four and a half billion years old.

And we believe it's loaded with organic compounds and water molecules.

And we think something like this brought those materials to the very early Earth and is the reason we have oceans and the reason we have life on this planet.

So the idea is you go back and you understand the chemistry that led to us being here today on this beautiful, wonderful planet that we live on.

And that'll help you understand how common is that process, how complicated was the chemistry, and how likely is that to have happened somewhere else in our solar system

And we actually think there's a couple locations in our solar system where there might be at least primitive life.

And then, of course, elsewhere in the galaxy and elsewhere in the universe, ultimately getting me back someday to that setting investigation that I was discouraged from pursuing as an undergrad.

We care about how we use telescopes to study asteroids.

We care about mining asteroids.

We care about asteroids crashing into the Earth and causing another extinction event like the dinosaurs experienced.

And so when we, I told you that story, the first two times we wrote the proposal, we were the Osiris mission.

And then we actually got to go into a higher budget program called the New Frontiers program.

And so we wanted to keep the OSIRIS brand name because NASA knew who we were and what OSIRIS was, but we also wanted to indicate we were kind of bigger and stronger and better than OSIRIS.

So we were thinking, okay, what should the mission name be?