NASA finds key ingredients of life in asteroid samples 03:46. Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water ...

The mission, which launched on Sept. 8, 2016, targeting the primordial asteroid Bennu, believed to have remained largely unchanged since the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.

Samples of matter returned from the asteroid Bennu support the theory that asteroids could have brought the building blocks of life to Earth, scientists report in a pair of new studies published ...

Astronomers estimate that an asteroid this large comes this close to Earth only about once every 7,500 years. It also appears ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned samples from asteroid Bennu, which showed discoveries about life and the early solar system. These findings can now provide information into the potential ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which successfully returned a sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2023, has provided significant new insights into both the asteroid’s composition and the ...

An impact from Bennu would be very destructive, but Earth has seen worse. Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid that was roughly 6 miles wide (10 kilometers across) struck Earth, killing most ...

This asteroid is one of the most likely to hit Earth. Here’s what it means for our future. New ultraprecise measurements show that the asteroid Bennu has a higher chance than thought of ...

One proposed way of examining if such a force could exist is by closely monitoring asteroid trajectories, and few near-Earth ...

By traveling to Bennu, NASA researchers reasoned, a probe could gather pristine material. The OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at the 1,850-foot-wide asteroid in 2020, scooped up rock and dirt, and then ...

The analysis of the Bennu samples is the scientific payoff for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which in 2016 launched a probe to the asteroid on a multiyear journey.The spacecraft jabbed the asteroid ...

Bennu, a rocky object classified as a near-Earth asteroid, has a one-in-2,700 chance of colliding with the Earth in September 2182, new research has discovered.