Asteroid Bennu is a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid that was studied by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission from 2018 to 2021. Skip to main content. Open menu Close menu. Space.

An early analysis of a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu suggests that the space rock had an unexpectedly water-rich past — and it may have even splintered off from an ancient ocean world ...

Bennu is a 1,600-foot-wide near-Earth asteroid that was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) Project. It passes by Earth approximately every 6 years. However ...

Five science instruments mapped Bennu's chemistry and mineralogy to determine the effect of sunlight on the asteroid's orbit. Cost of the mission, excluding launch, is $800 million.

Bennu’s parent asteroid likely broke apart 1 to 2 billion years ago, and some of the fragments came together to form the rubble pile we know as Bennu. These minerals are also found on icy bodies ...

NASA is about to recover a cup's worth of rocks and dirt from the mysterious asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA Over the past seven years, a NASA spacecraft has put 4.4 billion miles on the odometer as ...

In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu and scientists got to dive into a tale of rock, ice and water that hints at how life could have ...

An impact from Bennu would be very destructive, but Earth has seen worse. Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid that was roughly 6 miles wide (10 kilometers across) struck Earth, killing most ...

By traveling to Bennu, NASA researchers reasoned, a probe could gather pristine material. The OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at the 1,850-foot-wide asteroid in 2020, scooped up rock and dirt, and then ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe has spotted the asteroid Bennu flinging pieces of its own surface into space. These “particle ejection events” happen all the time, … ...

Bennu has an interesting history. It is 565 m across at its widest point and was once part of a much larger parent body, possibly 100 km in diameter, that was smashed apart in a collision in the ...

It took a while for scientists to gain access to the samples that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took from the asteroid Bennu, but the wait is proving to be worth it. A new study published January 29 ...