#OSIRIS-APEX

[thefallencomet]

A quick badge design I did to celebrate the successful return of samples from asteroid Bennu, and the beginning of the OSIRIS-APEX mission!

For context, after OSIRIS-REx dropped the samples off, it was renamed and has now begun a new mission to explore a new hazardous asteroid, the infamous asteroid Apophis!

This badge celebrates the shift from investigating the ways asteroids may seed life, to how they can threaten it.

[silverwingwashere]

This is the exact moment OSIRIS-REx became OSIRIS-APEX

Anyways, congratulations to NASA and Lockheed Martin for successfully recovering OSIRIS-REx's sample return capsule, containing asteroid samples from Bennu! With that mission done, OSIRIS-REx is not redesignated as OSIRIS-APEX, with the new mission of exploring the near-Earth asteroid of Apophis! Safe travels OSIRIS-APEX!

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[spaceflight-insider]

Asteroid Treasure: OSIRIS-REx returns with Bennu samples

The samples returned from asteroid Bennu are safely contained in the sample return capsule following its parachute-assisted touchdown in the Utah desert. Credit: NASA After a seven-year, 3.86-billion-mile odyssey, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission successfully delivered to Earth samples from asteroid Bennu. Continue reading Untitled

[kaiserouo]

Super OOC. I have absolutely no idea what their backstories are but I wanna draw them. Lord Shaxx complaining that their most formidable contestant hasn't come to the Crucible for too long.

[merelygifted]

After NASA's epic OSIRIS-REx capsule landing success, spacecraft heads to asteroid Apophis on new mission | Space

The NASA probe that delivered precious samples of the space rock Bennu to Earth is now on an extended voyage to study an infamous near Earth asteroid.

OSIRIS-REx completed NASA's first asteroid sample return mission on Sunday (Sept. 24), when its reentry capsule landed in the western Utah desert. But now the main spacecraft has embarked on a side quest: to scope out and get up close with Apophis, an asteroid previously thought to potentially pose a threat to Earth.

The spacecraft used its return to Earth to fling itself on a course toward Apophis. It fired its engines about 20 minutes after releasing the reentry capsule containing pristine material from the early solar system, effecting a trajectory change and setting it on another long, looping voyage.  ...

[teledyn]

Twenty minutes after the drop-off, the spacecraft will fire its thrusters to divert past Earth toward asteroid Apophis…

Wait. Apophis?

As in 99942-Apophis, Stargate SG1 villain, enemy of Ra, Torino scale highscore champion, the Uncreator evil serpent that dwells in the eternal darkness of the Duat headed-inbound-in-2036 Apophis?!

[spacenutspod]

Join us for SpaceTime Series 27 Episode 71, where we delve into the latest cosmic events and technological advancements reshaping our understanding of the universe. First, we discuss NASA's announcement that the Hubble Space Telescope will begin winding back its science programme due to ongoing issues with its gyroscopes. This decision marks a significant transition for the historic observatory, which has revolutionised astronomical discovery since its launch in 1990. Next, we cover the long-awaited launch of Boeing's Starliner, which has finally taken a crew to the International Space Station. This milestone paves the way for Starliner to join SpaceX's Dragon in transporting crews to the orbiting outpost under NASA's commercial crew programme. Finally, we highlight NASA's OSIRIS Apex spacecraft's survival after a close encounter with the sun. This mission is essential for its upcoming rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis in 2029. Follow our cosmic conversations on X @stuartgary, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Join us as we unravel the mysteries of the universe, one episode at a time. Sponsor Offer This episode is proudly supported by NordPass. Secure your digital journey across the cosmos with a password manager you can trust. Find your stellar security solution at https://www.bitesz.com/nordpass. Listen to SpaceTime on your favourite podcast app including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support SpaceTime Become a supporter of SpaceTime: If you'd like to support SpaceTime and access early release episodes, commercial-free...then look for us on Patreon or Supercast. Links on our website at spacetimewithstuart.com https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/ www.bitesz.com

[michaelgabrill]

NASAs OSIRIS-APEX Unscathed After Searing Pass of Sun

Mission engineers were confident NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification – Apophis Explorer) spacecraft could weather its closest ever pass of the Sun on Jan. 2, 2024. Their models had predicted that, despite traveling 25 million miles closer to the heat of the Sun than it was originally designed to, OSIRIS-APEX and its components […] from NASA https://ift.tt/3cS9GxJ

[celreniaworld]

Ok the fact they're sending a spacecraft named Osiris to an asteroid named Apophis is part of why I love astronomy

[night-dark-woods]

Ikora Week Day 3 - Undefeated

Shed thy self.

When I battled Madhir, he tried the same trick as Azirim. But I simply became someone else. I do not mean that I pretended to be someone else. I mean that I allowed Madhir to change me into someone who Madhir could not tempt.

I laugh much less since that day. But I am more content.

-First Calling of the Hidden, Annotated.

[on AO3] - cw for body horror & language reminiscent of sexual violence

...

The Ahamkara coils down the side of the mountain and through the orange-yellow-blue potholes of the hot springs until it can settle before her. It's in the form of something like a lion, something like a lizard, and yet nothing very much at all like either of those things. Its scales and fur are the same baked alkaline orange as the dirt around the springs; its throat and frills and rows of eyes glow Cherenkov-blue. Aposematism. And yet here she is anyway. She's never been good at listening to warnings.

Her head still hurts from Wei Ning's punch, and the pressure of the Ahamkara's voice only makes it worse. He's borrowed it from Osiris—he must be able to taste the bitter tang of her disappointment in herself for that misstep with Azirim—and he makes it known that his name is Madhir. He asks her what she wants.

Ikora traps the sides of her tongue between her teeth, bites down. Carefully, carefully, she thinks her way around the desire she knows he senses, thoughts averted like she’s looking away from a too-bright light. She knows the shape of it now, after Azirim—can feel the sticky guilt and sorrow in her throat and sidestep it before Madhir can sink his teeth in. Instead she says,

"I wish to be immune."

Madhir recoils, and a shiver passes through him. Not a shiver like a horse twitching its skin to shed a fly; a shiver like a ripple through a pond, his physical form going transiently wrong and revealing it as the lie it is, before he stabilizes.

He coils around her and above her, mouth stretching wider to show more teeth, to make room for more teeth than he had a moment prior. The Ahamkara have been learning from humanity throughout this genocide, reshaping themselves to fit ever more neatly into the grasp of human desires. Flint that knaps itself; intentional evolution happening before her very eyes. A smile is a useful tool for an apex predator that needs consent to feed—convincing, comforting. But this one hasn't learned the trick of it yet. And if she has her way, he never will.

"Do you know what you are asking?"

Osiris's voice, pitched like he's about to share some new discovery, glee like a banked fire.

"Do you understand what you are offering?"

Madhir coils tighter around her. The bioluminescent blue fans along his back are growing longer and fluttering in excitement, kicking a light wind into her face. His fur brushes the back of her neck and head, seeps out the rank hot carnivore smell of him. The claws on all his feet are extending and retracting, cutting deep grooves in the silty mud.

Ikora tilts her head back to stare at him. Her pulse is a rapid thrum, adrenaline tempered by practiced control, the steady anticipation of knowing exactly what corner your opponent is about to round in the Crucible.

Does she understand? She understands well enough. It's her only option. She's played out the scenarios, run the calculations last night while she was meditating beside the field of hot white ash that short hours prior had been Azirim. Azirim who defeated her, Azirim who waltzed right past all the precisely bound and catalogued selfish impulses she had accounted for, Azirim who rummaged through the back corners of her brain and returned with something sick and shining that for all her preparations she had missed. Azirim who proved she didn't, maybe couldn't, truly know herself.

She can't afford to have that happen again. The Vanguard, the City, Humanity itself can't afford to have that happen again.

If she cannot map her weaknesses, cannot suss out the desires lurking in her blind spots, well. A predator designed for the task will serve well enough as dowsing rod and cautery both.

"I understand."

Madhir strikes.

She had expected it to hurt, perhaps, but it just feels strange. His snout sinks into the hollow below her sternum, a tight knot like she's swallowed something too large too fast. She watches with interest— Ahamkara change their shape at will, but presumably some rules of physics must still apply? Her flesh is still there, taking up space, and yet his muzzle overlaps it, and is pushing deeper into her chest as she watches. And earlier too, the way his form had shivered like a reflection distorted by a thrown stone— maybe their shapes are all illusion? Lies made real, or real enough to fool. But then how would their bones-

Madhir starts to chew.

Her breath leaves her with a ragged cut-off cry, wind knocked out of her and replaced with hot red pain. When Ikora can open her eyes against the feeling, she expects gore, a warm soak of blood down her robes, but what she sees is worse.

Madhir's head is buried in her up to his first row of eyes now, which are slitted in pleasure. Her own body is distorting wrong and warped like his had, stretching like her ribs are as malleable as clay, flesh piling up in bloodless ripples to make room for the jaws that gnash and tear at something deep inside her, burrowing deeper still.

The sheer wrongness of it makes her panic. She struggles involuntarily, pure animal impulse of something caught in a trap, but his claws cut grooves into her arms as easily as they had in the clay, and hold her still as he feeds. Sharp carve of fangs through whatever part of her desires shares space with her lungs; hot lap of tongue against what hides between the anterior processes of her vertebrae. A deep, tugging pull that comes with a sensation oddly like walking from one room to another and forgetting what you came there for.

Madhir grows as he feeds, bending her backward in his grip as he shoves his head deeper into her ribcage, nosing around like a scavenger for the choicest scraps of organ meat. He grows enough that her feet come off the ground and her whole weight hangs from the blades of his claws. There is a hot wash of liquid down her front by now, but it isn't blood—Madhir is a messy eater, and he slavers at the feast she is giving him.

Ikora can glimpse the edges of what he's tearing out of her, a flicker-fast parade of weaknesses.

The guilty hum of the wish near-fulfilled by Azirim.

A cavalcade of wants that all sparkle bitter with the metallic scent of radiolaria and the sweet burn of incense.

Resentment at the duties she's been saddled with, that he left her with; The Last City at night, a weary need to be strong enough to bear the weight of all those lives.

The skittish, selfish want to not bear it at all: gunpowder clash of the Crucible, scent of pine trees from her first fumbling runs at scholarly suicide, long before she'd even heard the term thanatonaut.

The warm press of Chalco's arm around her shoulder; the flash of Eris's smile at a campfire.

A hundred, a thousand other wants, torn out at the root and devoured one by one, leaving raw hollows in their wake.

Once he's sated, once he has gorged himself on the rich meat of everything she's ever wanted and licked her clean of the crumbs of her smaller, simpler impulses, he drops her unceremoniously to the ground.

She crumples.

The slices from his claws bleed sluggishly as Ikora slowly drags herself back up to standing. A strange sensation, to stand without wanting it; stranger still to look at Madhir and feel nothing. Ikora can remember the riot of everything she wanted earlier: the desperate desire to not fail in her hunt, the hope her ploy would work, the wish to never again be understood without her consent like she had been by Azirim, but it's all gone. She looks at him now, licking his lips and basking like a lion after a kill, and feels nothing but a slight distaste.

A chill whisper of voidlight spins up between her fingers. She doesn't need to want his execution to know it needs to happen.

...

She stacks his bones and burns them to charcoal, and then to ash that mixes with the clear water of the hot springs until they're choked with fine gray paste.

She doesn't hear a single whisper.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

It’s Week 3 and I promised I’d commit to my theory for Season of the Seraph’s story arc if hubris didn’t come knocking for me before then, so time to put my money where my digital mouth is. I’ve seen folks talking about the first part of this theory, but not the second, so here goes: 1) Clovis will try to make himself the new Warmind and 2) in the process breach the Ascendant Realm and open the way for Xivu Arath.

Clovis, by the way, gave away the game like two minutes in because he can’t keep his dang mouth shut. Clovis couldn’t resist a good smug gloat. He gave it all away when Ana said god, fine, hop on this disk and we’ll go. He said, “Once I am in control, all will be as it should be. The Warmind will rise again.” 

As it should be? That line stopped me cold. Clovis hated that Rasputin was in charge. He couldn’t believe he, the genius Clovis Bray the first, was expected to take orders from a jumped-up calculator he used to own. A restored Rasputin is not “as it should be” in Clovis-land. What is “as it should be?” It’s Clovis, so that’s easy: the way things should be is with him in charge. He doesn’t say, “Rasputin will rise again.” He says, “The Warmind will rise again.” Clovis is going to get all the subminds together except put himself at the center instead of the Rasputin core Ana has, and try to make himself the new Warmind. All of which would just be fun to watch as we wait for Red to break him, but: there’s Xivu Arath to deal with. 

We’re all worried about Xivu getting into the warsats. I don’t think she wants them at all. In the Judgement of Kelgorath lore she doesn’t order Kelgorath to go get her some warsats. She says: possess the Warmind. Xivu Arath has plenty of weapons already. What she needs, as Mara points out, is a way in. Mara comments in the encounter dialogue that moving an army through the ascendant realm is very hard. But Xivu did it over Torobatl. How? Sav showed her the way: she did it by getting someone on the other side to build her a gate.

I was surprised in Season of the Hunt by the extent of control Xivu displayed. I thought her unlikely to go for subversive powers like Oryx’s Taking or Sav’s manipulation. But she’s a lot smarter than I gave her credit for. Her Wrathborn contagion is effective, coercive, and quick-spreading. It makes sense metaphorically: violence is a kind of disease, an insidious way of thinking that spreads and snares people till they see everything as a conflict to be settled by force. Xivu invaded the Cabal by infecting Caiatl’s co-ruler Umun’arath, general of the Cabal legions. Driven further and further into obsession with the conflict Xivu Arath makes herself synonymous with, Umun’arath invoked her in the rituals of warfare - the same ones Eris and Eido were discussing - opening the way for Xivu’s armies to pour into the skies over Torobatl. 

For Xivu to repeat that trick in our solar system, she needs another Umun’arath. But Umun’arath was a singularly convenient target: the military chief of the war machine of a huge conquering interstellar empire, or in other words, someone you might call...war-minded. When scouting our solar system Xivu probably heard the name “Warmind” and thought hell yeah, that’s my ticket in. Except it’s not, because Rasputin’s a) not coherent right now and b) not fundamentally the personality she needs. That’s what we’re already exploring this season: at his core Rasputin was never a martial system. He was a pretentious art nerd who got drafted. They made him a Warmind. Xivu Arath needs someone coterminous with war for its own sake, with conflict as the apex of existence, with the supreme violence she represents. And ironically it turns out the Warmind Rasputin is not sufficiently war-minded. 

But Clovis is.

Clovis Bray already sees life as endless contest and conflict via his pseudo-evolutionary legacy bullshit. He’s Xivu’s dream target. When you first see her forces attacking him Clovis is like “they want my precious braaaaaain!” and Osiris goes, “no, they want him. Brought to submit.” That’s exactly what Clovis wants of Rasputin (and to a lesser extent Ana and Elsie): brought to submit. He’s neck deep in Darkness on his own, no convincing needed. And he’s a coward. If Clovis hasn’t cut a deal yet with either Xivu or the Witness to ensure “humanity’s” (his) survival in exchange for his allegiance, he will as soon as he has the reins. After all, let it not be said that he left humanity to fend for itself, right?

So that’s her plan: Xivu Arath attacks the warsat infrastructure to force us to go to Clovis and give him access to Red’s enclave. She waits while we do all the hard work of laying out the subminds to conjure back Rasputin. Clovis inevitably betrays us to slot himself in instead and take control, rousing Rasputin’s entire apparatus of violence to impose his own command on the solar system, helped along by the Wrathborn contagion already brewing in his subconscious. In doing so he invokes such immense rites of war that he opens the way for Xivu to step through. It’s Torobatl all over again...except I don’t think trying to “become the Warmind” is going to work out the way Clovis thinks. 

Clovis still doesn’t understand what Rasputin is, and he still doesn’t understand - as he doesn’t understand with any of his kids - that Rasputin is no longer as Clovis designed him to be. Even Ana hasn’t fully gotten there yet. Both Brays are still thinking of Red as a sort of jigsaw puzzle to be pieced back together. But assembling himself was the first thing Rasputin ever did. Ana still hasn’t cracked the real reason “plug engram into Exo, receive Warmind” isn’t working: because Rasputin is a distributed intelligence. He lives in connections, literally and metaphorically - between warsats, between worlds, with Ana, with humanity. He’s a creature fundamentally built on network and communication. Rasputin is already still out there. He’s in that engram, but he’s everywhere else, too. He’s still in the warsats. He’s talking to us through the Sleeper nodes. He’s going to fight Clovis for control of that Exo Frame; that’s why the frame has red eye-lights in all the season art even though Clovis uses blue ones. 

And in the larger paracausal sense our entire solar system still bears the marks of the Warmind’s influence. He’s synonymous with the Golden Age. The same way Oryx conjured back Savathun and Xivu Arath by recreating the shapes they made, Rasputin will be conjured back by the shape he traced out in a huge web of connections and actions and effects on others that Clovis, an isolated point, fundamentally doesn’t understand. So Clovis is going to pull his little coup, possibly smashing that engram along the way, and he’s going to think it’s working, too - right before Rasputin cracks him open like an egg, because the Warmind never left. I think this season ends with us fighting Clovis in full Wrathborn mode while Xivu Arath’s armies stand ready just on the other side in the Ascendant Realm, hammering to get in, and Rasputin will deliver the final blow from inside - or maybe not, since killing Umun’arath completed the ritual last time, maybe we just wedge Clovis into his own Pillory engram - stopping Xivu from getting her beachhead and leaving her angry but stranded in the Ascendant Realm. 

Hopefully. Either way I can’t wait to see what happens.

[beardedmrbean]

Fresh off its historic mission to collect samples from an asteroid in deep space, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has its newest assignment: studying another asteroid during its close encounter with Earth.

OSIRIS-REx ended its seven-year, 4 billion-mile round-trip journey to collect samples from the space rock Bennu in September. But instead of shutting down the craft, the team proposed sending it on a second mission to the asteroid Apophis, expected to pass closer to Earth in 2029 than any other similarly-sized asteroid in recorded history.

They're renaming the spacecraft OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer).

"The close approach is a great natural experiment," Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, principal investigator for OSIRIS-APEX, said in a NASA press release last week. "We know that tidal forces and the accumulation of rubble pile material are foundational processes that could play a role in planet formation. They could inform how we got from debris in the early solar system to full-blown planets."

Apophis is a more than 1,000-foot-wide space rock named for an Egyptian deity and nicknamed the "God of Chaos."

The asteroid, first discovered in 2004, is expected to pass within 20,000 miles of Earth's surface — nearer than some satellites — on April 13, 2029. _________________

I got super excited for a extinction level event for a moment there

[warcost]

ROLEPLAY HISTORY

The rules are simple! Post characters you’d like to roleplay as, have roleplayed as, and might bring back. Then tag ten people to do the same (if you can’t think of ten, just write down however many you can and tag that number of people). Please repost, don’t reblog!

CURRENT MUSE:

osiris (destiny 2)

perceptor (transformers)

this multimuse (below)

Ballistic (Apex)

Leper (darkest dungeon)

Occultist

Atticus-1 (destiny 2)

Misraaks (destiny 2)

The Speaker (destiny 2)

Lord Timur (destiny 2)

The Young Wolf (destiny 2)

Tenth Doctor (doctor who)

Fourteenth Doctor (doctor who)

Cain (dnd)

Eoghan (dnd)

Gale (dnd)

Patroclus (hades)

The Arbiter (halo)

Ana Amari (overwatch)

Dreadstar (tf oc)

Excalibur Umbra (warframe)

Archangel Raphael (og oc)

Munin Manokk (og oc)

WANT TO WRITE

the third doctor (doctor who)

HAVE WRITTEN

robin (fe:a)

ryouma (fe:f)

silas (fe:f)

allura (vld)

cole cassidy (ovw)

fareeha amari (ovw)

reinhardt wilhelm (ovw)

operator oc (warframe)

zane julian (ninjago)

iida tenya (bnha)

ignis scientia (ffxv)

aziraphale (go)

obi-wan kenobi (sw)

seteth (fe:3h)

some others I've probably forgotten about

WOULD WRITE AGAIN

ignis scientia

fareeha amari (except i take a hammer and i fix the problems)

obi-wan kenobi

seteth

zane

stolen from. @desertbled

[once-was-muses]

The Demon Days, according to Ancient Egyptian myth, are the final five days of the calendar year. Originally, there were only 360 days, a perfect circle- but when Ra learned of a prophecy that a child of the sky goddess Nut would usurp his throne, and he then forbade his granddaughter from giving birth any day of the year, none other than the gods' Venerable Arbiter altered time itself to assist her. Winning enough moonlight from Khonshu- his replacement as chief lunar deity- in games of senet, Thoth fashioned them into five extra days, squeezing them between what's known now as December 26th and January 1st. An out of place swerve in the otherwise perfect circle. While these days resulted in the births of five major deities- Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and finally Nephthys- they're bad luck and potentially dangerous, filled with chaos and strong potential for disaster. No plans were ever made for the 27th through the 31st as the forces of order were especially weakened, and many would choose to stay home on the 29th- the middlemost Demon Day, and birthday of treacherous Set- as it was the farthest outside of the natural year. It was believed even the gods themselves were not exempt from these terrible days, each of Nut's five children reaching a feverish apex of power on their respective anniversaries of life followed by days of exhaustion, while the rest of the Netjer's strength was dampened for all five days. Thus the Demon Days are also a favored time for those that seek to imprison, wound, or even kill a god.

The trouble is, time has changed beyond Thoth's tampering, seeming to flow faster and faster as the years ticked by. Days of the present seem blistering compared to when Kemet was still the shining kingdom he remembers. Commitments and obligations have no care for ancient superstitions, no matter how much truth is behind them. Even with the Pharaoh and Queen suspending all meetings, and Ra ordering Set to remain on the sun barque with him until the New Year, there are still far too many loose ends for Thoth to follow suit. Several of the palace ushabtis were damaged- others totally destroyed- during King Horus and Lord Montu's most recent "sparring match," the archive in the Hall of Two Truths is horrifically disorganized from the fall of Rome to Haiti's independence, Lady Satet is threatening more unseasonable floods over yet another marital dispute with Lord Khnum- Thoth can practically feel the greys creeping higher and higher up his hair. He just doesn't have the option to sequester himself like the others this year.

Thoth groans to no one but himself as wakefulness returns to him like a boulder dropped onto him. There's no point in even trying to pretend like he'll be able to squeeze out a few more moments of blissful unconsciousness; his already minimal sleep is always lessened by this time of year, and what he does manage to get is plagued by stress dream and vision after stress dream and vision. Not even anything useful, rather incomprehensible glimpses at random points through space and time. He still documents everything for fear of one being somehow prophetic. With another self-pitying noise of empty protest, the scribe forces his heavy limbs to lift his aching body from the far too inviting expanse of his bed and out into the day.

As soon as he enters his library, he's made aware of the thousands of incoming correspondence waiting for his attention. The god cringes to think of the total number of offerings, prayers, and invocations these comparatively few were filtered out of. He's once again envious of the more robotic of his ushabtis, nonplussed by their endless work because they can't be. It'd be sublime to just turn his sentience off for a time, exist without experiencing if only for a moment or two...

With a sigh, he fastens his linen wraparound about his waist- he'd rather get to this mountain of work than fool with dressing himself properly- and approaches the waiting tablets. A handful of requests for blessing midterm grades, a few offerings of fine pens, a curse for an academic rival, a couple new pledgings- He should know better, but as soon as he counts himself lucky for finding nothing he needs to tend in person, one of his ushabti marches over to inform him he's just been called upon. By a mortal magician, no less. Exactly what he needed on this day.

If he were a crueler being, or had less sense, the lapis servant would be turned to shards where they stand. But then he'd just have to remake them, yet another thing on the to-do list.

He should've been more careful. He should've checked the method of summoning before he answered. He should've done a lot of things.

Thoth instantly knows something is wrong as his form materializes in the dark room, but there's nothing he can do after he's activated the trap. Not that he'd have the wits to react in time if he could. The spell winds itself around him like burning cold chains, sapping his own magic and stripping away his abilities. His very being feels like it's getting squashed as his avatar changes against his will, forcing him to shrink and trade his hair for feathers, hands for wings. Only adding to his agony, the passive spell keeping his mangled shoulder in place is interrupted, leaving him with only one working wing. He attempts to call out, expend whatever magic he has left to eviscerate whoever was insolent enough to try this with him- only for a hand to clench shut around his elongated neck, crushing his throat and allowing only a sickly, pitiful noise to escape.

Before he even has a chance to lay eyes on his attacker, dirty fingers pry the prosthetic eyes from their sockets, first the left then the right. As if being suddenly blinded isn't disorienting enough, he's dragged by that vice grip on his neck a distance before being roughly shoved, stuffed into something with metal bars, his bad wing getting caught on the opening and fire shooting through the limb. He can't keep himself from flinching when what's likely the cage door is slammed shut with a clang that seems to reverberate through him. Trying to right himself- at least maneuver off of his back and onto his feet- makes him painstakingly aware of the cramped space he's now trapped in, barely large enough for him to fit.

The magician speaks to him, voice more abrasive than the desert sand, but Thoth registers nothing that is said. His mind is trying to fold in on itself, hide away in a dark corner, cowering as the stress reaches critical mass- But then the cage is roughly shaken, causing him to fall over again.

"Didn't you hear me?! I want answers!"

This is over knowledge, then. Of course it is.

Thoth is disgusted by how small, frail his voice is as he begrudgingly answers, "what is it that you seek to know?"

[ Welcome to the Demon Days inbox event! As the name suggests, Thoth will be at the mercy of the inbox from today (Dec. 27th) until midnight EST New Year's Day. He has no choice but to answer every question he receives, so this is the perfect time to really pick at one of the most ancient minds in existence; ask him for the answers to historic mysteries, spells to achieve your deepest desires, his own awful secrets, etc.. Maybe you'd even like to antoganize him while he's trapped- but keep in mind he is the God of Retribution. ]

[ I, the mun, still hold the right to ignore any asks. However, that means more "skipping those that significantly upset me" rather than cherry picking and ignoring a large number of them. I do have to work until 7 tomorrow unfortunately, but I have until the 3rd off after that. I'll space answering event asks out over those five days so it hopefully won't grind to a halt before it's over. (I'll also likely be at the airport when this goes up, so slight delay to writing answers.) Make sure to indicate whether your ask is for the event. Here's hoping the remainder of your 2022 is significantly better than Thoth's will be. 💙 ]

[merelygifted]

NASA has more than twice the asteroid Bennu samples it could have hoped for from OSIRIS-REx probe | Space

The once inaccessible sample container has been fully opened, and NASA has released the numbers

We now know exactly how much material OSIRIS-REx captured from its target asteroid Bennu — and, it's a lot.

In addition to the 2.48 ounces (70.3 grams) of sample already collected from the outside of the canister, NASA has finally managed to fully open OSIRIS-REx's sample container to find another 1.81 ounces (51.2 grams) of asteroid Bennu within. In all, the probe collected more than twice what scientists had hoped for.

OSIRIS-REx completed its asteroid sample return mission when the probe parachuted a tightly-sealed container back to Earth on Sep. 24 before embarking on a secondary mission dubbed OSIRIS-APEX, named for its next space rock target, the asteroid Apophis.

With this container came the first pieces of an asteroid NASA has ever captured and returned for further study. The mission launched in 2016, and the safe recovery of the capsule last year was the ceremonious end to an epic seven-year journey through space. However, once NASA technicians got a hold of the sample container, they stumbled upon some complications — it was too difficult to open. ...