A similar phosphate was found in a sample from the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission and returned to Earth in December 2020. But the compound from ...

The asteroid passes by Earth every six years and has had three close encounters with Earth in 1999, 2005, and 2011, experts said in a new paper. Bennu is also expected to pass closer to Earth than the ...

If you were able to instantly (and safely) transport Bennu from space to the surface of Earth, it would collapse into a giant heap. Thus, Bennu is often referred to as a 'rubble pile' asteroid.

Its mission: travel to near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, spend more than three years there, mapping its surface, exploring its structure and composition, and then become NASA's first spacecraft to ...

Bennu, discovered in 1999, is classified as a "near-Earth object" because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years. It measures about half a kilometre across and is roughly the ...

Bennu is one of the most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system. Thanks to a visit by a NASA spacecraft, scientists have a much greater understanding of the near-Earth asteroid, its ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will deliver on Sunday material collected back in 2020 from the surface of asteroid Bennu, located more than 200 million miles (322 million kilometres) from Earth.

Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid that orbits as close as 300,000 kilometres to Earth, was part of an ancestral asteroid that formed in the early solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.

Ever since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them. The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made ...

“I’m perfectly excited.” The material comes from Bennu, previously known as near-Earth object 101955, a frozen chunk of rock about 500 metres across and roughly 450,000 kilometres from Earth.

Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182 — possibly close enough to hit. The data gleaned by Osiris-Rex will help with any asteroid-deflection effort, according to Lauretta.

Bennu's bits won't be the first asteroid pieces brought to Earth. Two previous Japanese missions have brought back samples. But the yield from OSIRIS is expected to be much larger.