"Asteroid Bennu may be a fragment of an ancient ocean world. That's still highly speculative. But it's the best lead I have right now to explain the origin of that material," Lauretta said.

Bennu is rich in carbon and is believed to be a leftover fragment from the formation of the solar system, a time capsule of sorts that may help illuminate the origin of life. The asteroid was ...

This is an enormous amount of sample for us.' Scientists are now inspecting snagged, bagged and tagged bits and pieces from asteroid Bennu, the cosmic mother lode delivered by NASA's Origins ...

Bennu is rich in carbon and is believed to be a leftover fragment from the formation of the solar system, a time capsule of sorts that may help illuminate the origin of life. After orbiting the ...

China’s Tianwen-2 mission has launched to explore an asteroid that may be a piece of the moon, as well as an active asteroid ...

Nearly 60 years later, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has ...

The fragment — a millimeter-size (0.04 inch) slice from the roughly 6-ounce (170 grams) sample that was collected from the asteroid Bennu and may contain the precursors to life — arrived at ...

They’re the building rocks of life. Analysis of debris from the nearly 5 billion-year-old asteroid Bennu suggests the ingredients to life on Earth were present in the early days of our solar ...

With the return of an Asteroid Bennu sample in 2023 as part of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, researchers from the University of Arizona have made significant discoveries toward understanding the ...

In 2016, NASA launched OSIRIS-REx, a robotic probe, to Bennu in order to gather clues ... scientists were able to study asteroids only when a fragment has fallen to Earth as a meteorite.

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs. The first analysis of the Bennu asteroid samples that NASA brought to Earth earlier ...

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 ...