NASA Is Launching an Asteroid-Sampling Space Probe Today: Watch It Live

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is ready to start its seven-year space journey. "We are prepared to launch this fantastic asteroid-retrieval mission," Tim Dunn, the NASA launch manager at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), said at a media briefing at KSC Tuesday (Sept. 6). The OSIRIS-REx mission (which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) will travel about 4.5 billion miles (7.2 billion kilometers) to the asteroid Bennu, NASA representatives