"Hopefully, humans may be able to defend our planet from Bennu by deflecting its trajectory if it heads toward Earth." In 2022, NASA rammed a spacecraft into the tiny asteroid Dimorphos as part of ...

But real lightning would have struck infrequently—and mostly in open ocean, where organic compounds would have quickly ...

The asteroid Bennu is puzzling scientists, with samples from the space rock showing weirder properties than they expected. These include extremely high nitrogen levels and improbably magnetic ...

The discovery of salty mineral evaporites on Ryugu indicates that watery environments may have been widespread in the early ...

Bennu is just the latest body in the Solar System ... The Dec. 25 Christmas Day pass saw 2024 YR4 come within 828,800 km of our planet, and a “precovery” observation of the asteroid taken ...

Bennu is a so-called medium-sized asteroid with a diameter of around 500 m. This type of asteroid is more likely to impact Earth than the “planet killer” larger asteroids, but has been studied far ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx set out to collect a pristine sample from asteroid Bennu, a cosmic time capsule that may hold clues to the origins of life in our solar system. But the journey was anything but easy.

If Bennu were to collide with the planet, the energy released would be equivalent to 1.4 billion tons of TNT, causing significant regional damage. First observed in 1950 and rediscovered after 50 ...