In May 2021, OSIRIS-REx began its journey back to Earth carrying dust from Bennu - a rubble-pile asteroid older than Earth itself. When the capsule was opened in 2023, scientists were stunned by ...

Bennu contains uracil, too. Bennu’s minerals offered crucial clues to how the asteroid formed — and how its amino acids and nucleobases developed along the way.

First, the team had to select an asteroid to target. Of the roughly 1.37 million known asteroids in our solar system, the team selected Bennu, a carbon- rich pile of boulders in a prime location.

Asteroid Bennu presented NASA’s OSIRIS-REx team with unexpected challenges, making it one of the trickiest missions to date. Discover how NASA’s mission planners adapted and what secrets Bennu ...

A 1.4-inch-wide (3.5 centimeters), 0.23-ounce (6.6 grams) rock is "by far our largest booty from the surface of Bennu," he said, gesturing toward fresh 3D scans of the rock taken at the curation ...

The sample, collected from the 4.5 billion-year-old near-Earth asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, arrived on Earth in a capsule on September 24, dropping from the ...

The sample, collected from the 4.5 billion-year-old near-Earth asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, arrived on Earth in a capsule on September 24, dropping from the ...

A 3D computer model of one of the particles showed it contained a large amount of carbon and evidence of water. But it's not liquid water, said Dworkin. The water is trapped in minerals.