Dante Loretta

We should change it to reflect the New Frontiers class mission.

And one of the team members threw out the idea, OSIRIS-REx.

And we all laughed like, you know, AP is right now.

And then I was like, that's actually pretty cool.

I said, we're going to make that happen.

So I call this my backronym.

You know, I made the words Regolith Explorer to fit the REX part of the mission so that we could be OSIRIS-REx and be this awesome, cool NASA mission that we are today.

So just so we're all on the same page here, here's a quick cartoon of our solar system.

Not to scale, but the sun dominates the mass of the solar system.

The planets have all the angular momentum of the solar system.

In the inner solar system, you've got things made out of mostly rock and metal.

Earth obviously has the liquid of oceans.

Out here, you have things made out of gases.

Out here, you have things that are mostly made out of ices.

And in between Mars and Jupiter, you have this belt of asteroids.

And these look a lot like these planets in their composition, but as you go to the edge, outer edge of the asteroid belt, they look more like the icy objects.

So you have a compositional gradient out here, and we would say we really want to get out to the asteroid belt, get a sample of those carbon-rich asteroids, which are close to Jupiter, and bring it back to the Earth.

But that wasn't really technically feasible, because it would take decades to fly a mission like that.

The good news is Jupiter prevented these things from forming a planet, which is why they're kind of frozen geologic remnants from the dawn of the solar system, and it's still stirring the pot up there.

It's still causing trouble.