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

This asteroid is one of the most likely to hit Earth. Here’s what it means for our future. New ultraprecise measurements show that the asteroid Bennu has a higher chance than thought of ...

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.

In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu and scientists got to dive into a tale of rock, ice and water that hints at how life could have ...

What was the most surprising or unexpected thing that happened as the mission unfolded? There are so many. I call Bennu the “trickster asteroid” because it constantly surprised us and challenged us.

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

Astronomers estimate that an asteroid this large comes this close to Earth only about once every 7,500 years. It also appears ...

Bennu, a rocky object classified as a near-Earth asteroid, has a one-in-2,700 chance of colliding with the Earth in September 2182, new research has discovered.

It took a while for scientists to gain access to the samples that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took from the asteroid Bennu, but the wait is proving to be worth it. A new study published January 29 ...

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 ...

By traveling to Bennu, NASA researchers reasoned, a probe could gather pristine material. The OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at the 1,850-foot-wide asteroid in 2020, scooped up rock and dirt, and then ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Timothy J McCoy, Smithsonian Institution and Sara Russell, Natural History Museum ...