In October 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on Bennu and collected a sample of surface material, stowing it in a capsule that the spacecraft returned to the Utah desert Sept. 24 ...

Bennu was also an attractive target because it skirts the asteroid belt, which circles the sun between Mars and Jupiter. At its closest, the asteroid is 200 million miles from Earth. While still a ...

In 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached asteroid 101955 Bennu. Two years later, the spacecraft snagged a sample of its surface, which has since been returned to Earth. Now, astronomers are ...

Asteroid Bennu is a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid that was studied by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission from 2018 to 2021.

Since being cleaned and placed in the clean room, the OSIRIS-REx sample from Bennu has been under constant monitoring, including using nitrogen to help protect the sample from oxygen and moisture.

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 ...

NASA's asteroid samples from Bennu hold not only building blocks for life, including amino acids and all five DNA and RNA nucleobases, but also the salty remains of an ancient water world ...

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.

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 ...

Bennu orbits at an average speed of 63,000 miles per hour. Once close to Earth, it takes around 1.2 years to orbit the sun fully, and rotates once every 4.3 hours.

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 is a collection of crumbs from an earlier asteroid floating around the early Solar System roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike the meteorites scientists get to study from Earth, ...