Egyptian folklore claims that the Bennu bird was born from the heart of Osiris, or burst forth from the ashes of a holy tree near the eternal city of the sun god, Ra. The legend says that ...

A Bennu sample on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History after it was unveiled to museumgoers Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. James Di Loreto and Phillip R. Lee, Smithsonian.

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and traveled 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) to reach Bennu. Once there, the spacecraft orbited the asteroid for nearly two years as flight ...

Underground pools of liquid brine probably formed 4.6 billion years ago on the parent body of the asteroid Bennu and contained the building blocks of life but not living creatures. Planetary ...

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Scanning electron microscope images of trona found in samples of the asteroid Bennu returned by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Trona is water-bearing sodium carbonate, also known commonly as soda ash.