NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Etched into Collier Trophy, Aerospace History

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has been immortalized at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington as the latest awardee of the Robert J. Collier Trophy. Bestowed annually by the National Aeronautic Association, the trophy recognizes groundbreaking aerospace achievements.

OSIRIS-REx, formally the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer, was honored “for successfully executing the first American retrieval of an asteroid sample and its return to Earth,” according to the award citation. The award was announced in March, and the OSIRIS-REx team visited the museum on June 13, 2024, to see the mission’s name engraved in brass at the base of the statue.

“It just blows me away to see the OSIRIS-REx team engraved on the Collier trophy, next to names like Orville Wright, the Apollo 8 crew, and the Voyager Mission Team,” said Michael Moreau, OSIRIS-REx deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.  “I’m so proud of our amazing team that their excellence and sacrifice to make the OSIRIS-REx mission so successful have been recognized with this prestigious award.”

While NASA’s accomplishments have been honored with the Collier award many times, this is one of just a handful of instances that NASA Goddard has been a major partner on a winning team. NASA Goddard most recently claimed a share of the award in 2022 for the James Webb Space Telescope. Previous wins also include 1993 honors for the Hubble Space Telescope and the 1974 prize for a NASA–U.S. Geological Survey satellite that began the long-running Landsat program that studies and monitors changes to Earth’s land masses.

The OSIRIS-REx team includes NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado; the University of Arizona, Tucson; and KinetX in Tempe, Arizona. NASA’s Johnson Space Center is responsible for the curation of the Bennu sample material that OSIRIS-REx returned to Earth in September 2023.

The Collier Trophy resides in a glass case in the “America by Air” section on the museum’s first floor. The century-old trophy stands at over 7 feet tall and weighs 525 pounds. The bronze sculpture depicts a globe, with three figures emerging from it. The sculpture rests on two walnut bases, each adorned with an engrave brass plaque bearing the names of the recipients.

Baltimore sculptor Ernest Wise Keyser designed the Trophy in 1910 for Robert J. Collier, the publisher of Collier’s Weekly magazine and president of the Aero Club of America.

By Rani Gran
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.