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.

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 ...

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 ...

So, over the course of OSIRIS-REx’s many orbits, engineers have built a map of Bennu’s many hazards. Using a tool called Natural Feature Tracking, OSIRIS-REx will be able to match what it sees ...

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.

Near-Earth asteroid Bennu has a slim chance of colliding with Earth in 2182. If it does, the impact could trigger a global winter that affects our planet for years.

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 ...

Since arriving at the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission has brought a wealth of observations of the near-Earth asteroid revealing at the same time a lot of surprises. ... changing ...

Near-Earth asteroid Bennu has a slim chance of colliding with Earth in 2182. ... estimated to be the size of four Mount Everests, slammed into Earth more than 3.2 billion years ago. ...