Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is believed to be part of a larger asteroid that collided with another space rock. It’s about one-third of a mile wide and is roughly the height of the Empire ...

Bennu's "rubble pile" appearance has puzzled scientists for nearly two years, ... a senior staff scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a NASA statement.

Bennu is roughly 1,640 feet (500 meters) wide — or as large as the Empire State Building — and upon impact it would release 1,200 megatons of energy, or 24 times as much as the most powerful ...

By traveling to Bennu, NASA researchers reasoned, a probe could gather pristine material. The OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at the 1,850-foot-wide asteroid in 2020, scooped up rock and dirt, and then ...

NASA's final tally shows that OSIRIS-REx collected roughly 4 ounces (120 grams) of material from asteroid Bennu. ... Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science.

The spacecraft reached Bennu in 2018 after traveling 320 million kilometers from Earth. It spent two years mapping its surface, then collected a 120g sample before landing back on Earth in 2023.

NASA's asteroid-sampling spacecraft had a near-death experience at Bennu, ... Ph.D., was a staff writer in the spaceflight channel between 2022 and 2024 specializing in Canadian space news.

Nasa's unmanned Osiris-Rex spacecraft launched from Florida in 2016 and reached Bennu just over two years later. It made a brief, five-second contact with the asteroid in October 2020, gathering ...

The most worrisome day would be Sept. 24, 2182, but there would be only a 0.037 percent chance of its being a bad day. Bennu is about a third of a mile, or half a kilometer, wide.

Before Osiris-Rex arrived on the scene, scientists put the odds of Bennu hitting Earth through the year 2200 at 1-in-2,700. Now it’s 1-in-1,750 through the year 2300. The single most menacing ...

Asteroid Bennu is a primordial goldmine of secrets. A relic from our early solar system, it may hold molecular precursors to the origin of life. Bennu's orbit takes it close to the Earth every six ...