In the quest to understand the fundamental forces of nature, scientists have turned their attention to a long-debated theory: the existence of a fifth force. A recent study,published in Nature ...

Bennu, one of the most dangerous near-Earth objects, has been meticulously tracked by optical and radar astrometric data since it was discovered in 1999. As the destination for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid ...

The asteroid Bennu is puzzling scientists, with samples from the space rock showing weirder properties than they expected. These include extremely high nitrogen levels and improbably magnetic ...

In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu and scientists got to dive into a tale of rock, ice and water that hints at how life could have ...

Asteroid Bennu seems to have come from a long-lost world on the fringes of the solar system, where saltwater pooled and dried over thousands of years and life’s basic ingredients were widespread.

Bennu — a rubble pile just one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across — was originally part of a much larger asteroid that got clobbered by other space rocks.

In 2018, the OSIRIS-REx mission arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to collect pristine samples, untouched by alterations induced by Earth's atmosphere, to be analyzed on Earth.

But these early images revealed that Bennu’s surface was not like a sand-covered beach, as the team had hoped; it was populated with massive boulders, any one of which could tip OSIRIS-REx over ...

An asteroid, then, is “a time capsule,” says Richard Binzel, an astronomer and asteroid expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who joined the mission in 2004.

But radar observations have suggested that Apophis is shaped roughly like a peanut – a relatively common shape among near-Earth asteroids larger than 660 feet in diameter, according to NASA.

This image shows four views of asteroid Bennu along with a corresponding global mosaic. The images were taken on Dec. 2, 2018, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s PolyCam camera.