Oct 23, 2017

As of Oct. 23, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is traveling at approximately 25,000 kph relative to Earth. The spacecraft is approximately 17 million km from Earth and 57.7 million km from Bennu. But because Bennu is orbiting around the Sun and isn’t stationary, the spacecraft must still travel 948 million km before it can catch up to the asteroid.

On Oct. 16, the spacecraft’s communications downlink rate decreased to 10 kbps.  Because of the low data rates and other mission planning activities, no science observations are planned through Jan. 7, 2018.