If the near-Earth asteroid Bennu were to collide with Earth in the future, the space rock could cause substantial global damage, even though it’s a fraction of the size of the asteroid that ...

Although the chances of impact are slim, Bennu is still one of the most potentially hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, and we need to be prepared for what could come. A first-of-its ...

Analysing returned samples Tim McCoy (right), curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and research geologist Cari Corrigan examine scanning electron microscope ...

A modern case in point: The asteroid Bennu contains all the materials needed for life. The OSIRIS-REx mission launched in 2016. Its main aim was to study Bennu and retrieve samples to bring back ...

Credit: NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold 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 ...

The modest container was holding samples collected from Bennu, a diamond-shaped asteroid billions of miles away, and had been traveling through the dark corridors of space for years. After it ...