OSIRIS-REx fired braking rockets to slow its speed to match Bennu's. It orbited the asteroid and began a months-long survey in October 2020. Extensive mapping, from an altitude of about 3 miles ...

REx mission is scheduled to return samples of Asteroid Bennu to Earth. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ...

On Sunday, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flew by Earth and dropped a sample of asteroid Bennu to Utah's West Desert. The mission went "absolutely perfectly," and NASA scientists hope the sample will ...

OSIRIS-REx is renamed OSIRIS-APEX and sent to Apophis, a 1,100-foot-wide asteroid expected to pass Earth at a distance of 20,000 miles in 2029. Jan. 19, 2024 : TAGSAM is opened and Bennu samples ...

That mission, OSIRIS-REx, delivered pieces of the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu to Earth late last month.NASA gave the world its first look at the sample today (Oct. 11) during a live webcast ...

OSIRIS-REx also discovered that Bennu’s orbit is changing. A “day” on Bennu lasts a short 4 hours and 17.8 minutes. But that’s enough to heat up the asteroid’s dayside.

The seven-year Osiris-Rex mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and traveled 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) to reach Bennu. Once there, the ...

Bennu is categorized as a near-Earth asteroid, and scientists say there is a 1-in-1,750 chance it could slam into Earth during a series of very close passes between 2175 and 2199. Bennu is not ...

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History will unveil the first public display of a sample of Bennu—a carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid—to museumgoers Friday, Nov. 3. The rocky fragment was ...

After a three-year trip aboard the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a capsule containing dust and rocks from the asteroid Bennu will make a fiery plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere on September 24, as ...

The team focused on periods when researchers knew OSIRIS-REx’s position relative to Bennu to within a meter (3.3 feet), based on images the spacecraft was taking of the asteroid’s surface.