Following a nearly three-year journey through space, the canister containing samples from asteroid Bennu has finally been opened.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on its way to Earth to drop off rocky samples from asteroid Bennu on Sunday, marking NASA’s first attempt to retrieve a piece of a pure space rock.
NASA’s $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission launched to space in September 2016 with a simple, albeit ambitious, objective: travel to a distant asteroid and bring back a sample of it.
A mighty spacecraft is headed towards Earth, carrying rock and dust from a distant asteroid to hand off to eager scientists waiting to analyze the precious sample. The OSIRIS-REx mission recently fired its thrusters to set itself on a course towards the sample drop-off site, with its rendezvous on Earth scheduled for…
After the successful impact of NASA’s DART mission on the Dimorphos asteroid, scientists have encountered a series of unexpected outcomes, the latest being the unanticipated lengthening of the asteroid’s orbital period around its larger partner, Didymos.
An asteroid-hunting algorithm set to be implemented in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 10-year survey spotted its first potentially hazardous asteroid, proving the algorithm’s capabilities in advance of the observatory’s opening.
The prominent astrophysicist and musician Brian May is co-authoring a three-dimensional atlas of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, an 85-million-ton hunk of rock orbiting the Sun.
After landing on an asteroid nearly three years ago to scoop up a sample from its rocky surface, the OSIRIS-REx mission is finally in the homestretch. NASA is preparing for the special delivery of the rocky sample next month and the agency just pulled off the most realistic rehearsal for the big day.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have detected nearly 40 boulders near Dimorphos—the target of NASA’s wildly successful DART experiment to deflect a non-threatening asteroid. This isn’t exactly positive news, since it suggests that hitting a bona fide hazardous asteroid might create a cluster of possibly…