A University of Tokyo team achieved the feat with an AI-based rock identification tool that was fed information on rocks on Earth and other celestial bodies.

This September, the agency is scheduled to launch a robotic spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, which will fly to within a few miles of a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu ... landing location for a rover.

In May 2021, OSIRIS-REx began its journey back to Earth carrying dust from Bennu - a rubble-pile asteroid older than Earth itself. When the capsule was opened in 2023, scientists were stunned by ...

Every six years, an asteroid by the name of Bennu passes by Earth. Bennu is a small, loosely compacted ball of black rocks that formed nearly 4.6 billion years ago. Recently, scientists ...

2025 HU isn't the only asteroid approaching the Earth today. NASA is also tracking an airplane-sized space rock known as 2025 GD1, which is estimated to be about 86 feet across and will zip past the ...

This is a still from an animation showing asteroid 2024 YR4 as it passes by Earth and heads toward its potential impact with the Moon. This 3D shape of the asteroid was determined from data obtained ...

The goal, he shares, is to figure out the asteroid's composition. Visualizations of different asteroids, comparing their size. Donaldjohanson is considerably larger than Bennu, Ryugu and Dinkinesh.

The asteroid is likely fully solid, and not a rubble pile like the large asteroids Bennu and Ryugu. It was probably a fragment of a much larger body, freed after a collision that began moving ...

So, the OSIRIS‑REx mission ventured to the asteroid Bennu to retrieve an unaltered sample. Retrieving this sample allowed scientists to examine the asteroid’s composition in detail.