Enceladus, a 310-mile-wide moon of Saturn, has an icy shell encasing a salty ocean with many of the same minerals as Bennu.

Bennu — a rubble pile just one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across — was originally part of a much larger asteroid that got clobbered by other space rocks.

For instance, Saturn's moon Enceladus contains phosphates, a key building block of life and at levels much higher than Earth's oceans. "Asteroid Bennu may be a fragment of an ancient ocean world.

The magnesium–sodium phosphate in the Bennu sample resembles sodium phosphates on Enceladus. This Saturn moon is wrapped in a saltwater ocean under ice and known to shoot enormous geysers into ...

Here’s how it works. A small piece of the asteroid Bennu, which was returned to Earth by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, debuted on public display at Space Center Houston on Friday, March 1, 2024.

For the study, the researchers used a transmission electron microscope at Goethe University to analyze grains that were part of the 122 grams (0.27 pounds) of dust samples returned to Earth by NASA’s ...

"Can humanity enjoy the benefits of both asteroid and lunar mining without compromise, or do we have to choose one at the expense of the other?" ...

Bennu is a roughly 0.3-mile-wide (500 meters) asteroid that orbits in near-Earth space. Scientists suspect it’s a chunk of a larger asteroid that broke off due to a collision farther out.

Photo by James Tralie/NASA Jan. 29 (UPI) -- Rock and dust samples from the Bennu asteroid contain molecules that are the "key to life" on Earth, NASA officials announced on Wednesday.

NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned 122 grams (4 ounces) of dust and pebbles from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, delivering the sample canister to the Utah desert in 2023 before swooping off ...

Bennu — a rubble pile just one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across — was originally part of a much larger asteroid that got clobbered by other space rocks.

Bennu — a rubble pile just one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across — was originally part of a much larger asteroid that got clobbered by other space rocks.