Arizona Illustrated

When the Rancho Vistoso Golf Course closed in 2018, Oro Valley residents rallied together to save the land and wildlife inhabiting the area from development. The Preserve Vistoso community group raised 2 million dollars and partnered with the Conservation Fund to protect the property. The preserve has 6 miles of paved trails, and it is managed by Oro Valley Parks and Recreation. Arizona Illustrated producer David Fenster is passionate about fungi and filmmaking. In this edition of his Field Notes series, he looks back on a 15 year love affair with mushrooms and shares excerpts from the many films he’s made on the subject. The OSIRIS-REx NASA mission, which is spearheaded by scientists at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), made history in 2020 when it successfully touched down on an asteroid named Bennu and collected a sample of rock to bring back to Earth for study. Now the heralded OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is being prepared for a second mission: to the near-Earth asteroid named Apophis, which will come so close to impacting our planet in 2029 that it will be visible to the naked eye. The extended mission has a new name, OSIRIS-APEX, and a new Principal Investigator, Dani DellaGiustina, who started out on the OSIRIS missions as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. Water reclamation is the process of converting municipal wastewater (sewage) into water that can be reused for a variety of purposes. Here is a behind the scenes view of what that process looks like at Tucson Water. Architect Elaine Becherer shares what makes the Mirror Lab her favorite place.