Growing up, Ossyris Bury had many interests: dance, cheerleading, art, softball, ice skating. “I was never one to say no to trying something new,” she says. “But for the longest time, I couldn’t find my passion.”
That changed on the morning of Sept. 8, 2016. Sitting in her eighth-grade engineering class, Bury learned that NASA was launching a mission to collect a sample from asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft’s name: OSIRIS-REx.
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s so cool! That spacecraft has the same name as me,’” she says. “From that moment on, I wanted to learn everything about space.”
Now an aerospace engineering major at UCF, Bury splits her time between studying astrodynamics, developing flight simulation models and working part-time, both as a campus tour guide and teaching assistant for more than 500 first-year engineering students. This May, she earned the Goldwater Scholarship — one of the nation’s highest honors for undergraduates in STEM — to support her deep-space research on near-Earth asteroids.
After graduation, she hopes to stay at UCF for a doctorate in aerospace engineering. But her ambitions extend far beyond spacecraft design.
Her ultimate mission: to send the next satellite or telescope into space — or, better yet, to go herself.
“That would be a full-circle moment,” she says. “And I couldn’t think of a better way to thank those who believed in me.”
