Analysis of samples brought back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu reveal that it has a bizarre chemical make-up and is ...

YR4, which orbits the sun every four years and periodically crosses Earth's orbit. The nature of its orbit makes it a ...

Bennu was the target for NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sampling mission, which touched down briefly on the space rock in October 2020 to gather over 4 ounces of material, and then brought that sample ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully returned a generous chunk of the asteroid Bennu to Earth in 2023, and scientists have been analyzing it ever since. International scientific teams have ...

Astro Brief is a collaboration between KSMU, the Missouri Space Grant, and MSU's Department of Physics, Astronomy and ...

This undated image made available by NASA shows the asteroid Bennu from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. This undated image made available by NASA shows the asteroid Bennu from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

Scientists have confirmed the presence of organic molecules on the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, opening the door to the possibility that life on Earth arose from cosmic origins.

NASA's robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft journeyed to Bennu and in 2020 collected samples of rock and dust for analysis. A study published in January showed that Bennu's samples bore some of the ...

The samples were delivered by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission—the first US project to bring asteroid samples home. Bennu was an especially interesting target. Prior work had suggested asteroids have the ...

While the odds of Bennu impacting Earth may sound alarming, they're not entirely unexpected. "On average, medium-sized asteroids collide with Earth about every 100–200 thousand years.