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.

Dozens of NASA's spaceflight missions that launched from Florida could be in jeopardy under a budget proposal from the Trump administration.

The US OSIRIS-REx mission (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer) collected dust and rocks from asteroid Bennu and returned them to Earth in 2023.

The US OSIRIS-REx mission (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer) collected dust and rocks from asteroid Bennu and returned them to Earth in 2023.

First spotted back in 1999, Bennu's carbon-rich structure immediately captured the attention of scientists as this foundation is a fundamental basis for life. Its abundance of carbon-based compounds ...

Life on Earth relies on molecular building blocks to make DNA and proteins. Scientists have long wondered how prevalent these precursors were at the birth of our solar system. A sample of dust and ...

Scientists speculate that Bennu is part of a much larger ancestral asteroid that formed in the farthest reaches of the early solar system approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Japan’s efforts ...

Additional analyses discovered all five nucleobases or building blocks of RNA and DNA in the Bennu samples. A major discovery was that the chemical structure of the molecules found on Bennu is ...

An impact from Bennu would be very destructive, but Earth has seen worse. Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid that was roughly 6 miles wide (10 kilometers across) struck Earth, killing most ...

The return capsule containing a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is seen shortly after touching down in the desert at the Department of ...

The return capsule containing a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is seen shortly after touching down in the desert at the Department of ...