I call Bennu the “trickster asteroid” because it constantly surprised us and ... These are all things we should be taking a serious look at, and we should be building an archive of the geologic ...

That’s the asteroid known as 101955 Bennu. He’s watching it while perched on an upholstered metal stool inside an unassuming building in Littleton, Colorado.

WASHINGTON: Bennu, a rocky object that is categorised as a near-Earth asteroid, is currently around 186,000 miles (299,000 km) distance from Earth, its closest. With a one in 2,700 possibility of ...

Left: This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. File photo via NASA. Related.

Asteroid Bennu seems to have come from a long-lost world on the fringes of the solar system, where saltwater pooled and dried over thousands of years and life’s basic ingredients were widespread.

Bennu is both an old and a new asteroid. Like all of the millions of other objects in the asteroid belt, it formed 4.5 billion years ago when our solar system was just accreting.

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.

This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. NASA. Copy link. Email. X (Twitter) Bluesky. Facebook. LinkedIn.

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists studying samples that NASA collected from the asteroid Bennu found a wide assortment of organic molecules that shed light on how life arose. Listen to this article · 7:42 min Learn more.

NASA's first asteroid sample is the most pristine sample of its kind. Now, back on Earth, the sample from asteroid Bennu has already delivered surprising findings about the early solar system and ...