That’s why NASA launched a mission to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2016. In 2020, the OSIRIS-REx mission made history by successfully collecting a sample from the asteroid. This was the first U.S.

In October 2020, a van-sized robotic spacecraft briefly touched down on the surface of Bennu, a 525-meter-wide asteroid 320 ...

Researchers are unlocking secrets of our solar system by analyzing asteroid Bennu samples, some of the most pristine ever ...

The Bennu samples contain 14 of the 20 amino acids that are essential for life on Earth to build proteins. Also found were ...

But samples taken directly out of an asteroid like Bennu, which has been floating around in the cold vacuum of space for billions of years, preserve a pristine ancient snapshot. Water and a high ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu and scientists got to dive into a tale ...

Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers ...

NASA scientists found amino acids, key minerals, and nucleobases for DNA in samples from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission.

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life ...

The meteor fragments returned by OSIRIS-REx shed light on the entwined history of water and the chemical ingredients of life ...

Bennu has long intrigued researchers due to its near-Earth orbit and carbon-rich composition. Scientists theorized that the ...

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 ...