NASA’s OSIRIS-REx must avoid ‘Mount Doom’ to return a sample of the asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft will attempt to retrieve material from the Nightingale site in August 2020 ...

NASA is celebrating tonight after its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully touched the Bennu asteroid in a bid to collect rock and dust samples from its surface. Skip to main content.

OSIRIS-REx is equipped with a "Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism," or TAGSAM, on the end of a 10-foot-long robot arm. The collect samples, the probe will creep up to Bennu, pressing the ...

NASA attempts first ever mission to retrieve sample from asteroid 03:16. Playing a cosmic game of tag, a NASA spacecraft extended an 11-foot-long robot arm and descended to the surface of a small ...

UPDATE: Oct. 20, 2020, 6:41 p.m. EDT: The story below has been updated to reflect that NASA successfully touched the surface of Bennu to collect samples. Asteroid Bennu has had its close-up. On ...

A top-down view of asteroid Bennu from the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft from a distance of about 186 miles on March 4, before a final flyby that took place April 7.

It then continued a treacherous, 11-minute coast past a boulder the size of a two-story building, nicknamed “Mount Doom,” to touch down in a clear spot in a crater on Bennu’s northern ...

Bennu will make a series of very close passes of Earth between 2175 and 2199. ... That included a pointy pillar nicknamed Mount Doom, which is as tall as a two- or three-story building.

Bennu is also expected to pass closer to Earth than the moon in 2135 and if it does, our planet's gravitational pull could put it on the path to striking Earth on September 24, 2182.

OSIRIS-REx will touch down on asteroid Bennu, collect a sample of the dust and begin its journey back to Earth, where scientists will study it, hoping to learn secrets of the solar system's origin.

Just over two decades ago, the asteroid Bennu was nothing but a distant light in the night sky, shining from 200 million miles away. In 1999, the ancient space boulder crept close enough to Earth ...

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 ...