Earth lives in a shooting gallery, with small and large rocky bodies in abundance in our solar system. Are we in danger of ...

By late October, on-board cameras will reveal the asteroid’s shape. In November, it’s expected Bennu will appear large enough for its craters and boulders to be visible to onboard cameras.

A series of images from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission show the spacecraft approach and touch down on asteroid Bennu’s surface, over 200 million miles away from Earth, to collect a sample on ...

The world breathed a sigh of relief when NASA confirmed the asteroid was no longer likely to hit Earth. But scientists now warn that the threat posed by this space rock is far from over.

Pole-to-pole, Bennu is taller than the Empire State Building and about 500 meters in diameter at its equator. It orbits the sun every 1.2 years, traveling at 63,000 mph and rotating every 4.3 hours.

Bennu is classified as a “potentially hazardous asteroid,” meaning the object is more than 460 feet (140 meters) wide and could theoretically come within 4.65 million miles of Earth.

Astronomers estimate that an asteroid this large comes this close to Earth only about once every 7,500 years. It also appears to be a stony, non-metallic type of asteroid known as an ordinary ...

Scientists at the University of Arizona, leading the analysis of these asteroid fragments, are already uncovering unprecedented elements. With more than 1,000 particles studied, some exceeding half an ...

NASA predicts a large asteroid could impact Earth in the future, potentially affecting an area the size of Texas. Asteroid Bennu, passes by Earth roughly every six years, experts have been closely ...

In 2018, it arrived at Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid as wide as the Sears Tower is tall. The mission collected pieces of the asteroid and brought them back to Earth in 2023.