After being dropped off on Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, pieces of asteroid Bennu will be revealed to the public for the first time on Wednesday.
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…
Scientists working to open up the sample canister containing rock and dust from asteroid Bennu have run into a problem: there’s just too much of it.
Following a nearly three-year journey through space, the canister containing samples from asteroid Bennu has finally been opened.
NASA has successfully returned a 250-gram sample of dirt from a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. Scientists around the world will study the rock particles to see if they contain clues to the origins of life on our planet.
United Launch Alliance via NASA
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.