I call Bennu the “trickster asteroid” because it constantly surprised us and challenged us. The most surprising thing that directly impacted the mission is the rugged nature of Bennu’s surface. We ...

On October 20, 2020, Bennu became the third asteroid to be sampled by spacecraft when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx plunged its arm into the surface (below) and collected some of its dust and pebbles.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar spacecraft landed upright on the Moon–a first for a private company–and released amazing HD video of the moment.

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 ...

Bennu’s parent body would not have been large enough to hang onto an atmosphere and thus would not have had surface lakes. But that doesn’t mean it could not have harbored bodies of water.

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 collection of crumbs from an earlier asteroid floating around the early Solar System roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike the meteorites scientists get to study from Earth, the rocks ...

New tools and techniques can be transformative. Last year proved this time and again, as researchers took the first picture of the Milky Way Galaxy with particles instead of photons and an ...

OSIRIS-REx's van-sized craft visited Bennu, scraped and collected material from the asteroid’s surface and sealed it into a 3-foot-wide container equipped with a heat shield, called the Sample ...

Its black surface is packed with boulders, and it orbits the sun every 14 months. Bennu is rich in carbon and is believed to be a leftover fragment from the birth of the solar system, 4.5 billion ...

It is a stony-type asteroid with some iron and nickel mixed in, though less carbon and water compared to Bennu. At nearly 1,100 feet (340 meters) in length, its shape may be like a peanut, its two ...