“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the Osiris-Rex mission, at a news conference last mont ...

When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft swings by Earth on Sunday, it is expected to deliver a rare cosmic gift: a pristine sample collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. If all goes according to ...

NASA's OSIRIS-Rex capsule carrying an asteroid sample successfully ... Lauretta said. "This is a gift to the world." ...

The sample is nearly 5% carbon by weight, making it one of the highest concentrations of carbon to be studied in an asteroid, according to Dr. Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe captured photos during the release of its return capsule last month, preserving the historic moment for posterity. Those images, which the space agency released on ...

Seven years after the NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx first launched from American soil in 2016, the Sample Return Capsule — or SRC — made a relatively gentle landing inside the Utah Test and ...

Shot into space as part of the agency's OSIRIS-REx mission in 2016, the capsule was enclosed for years within a spacecraft that made a 4-billion-mile-long journey to reach Bennu. Once on the ...

OSIRIS-REx's first target, Bennu, is an 85.5 million-ton (77.5 million metric tons) space rock that is on track to swoop within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of Earth's orbit between ...