The museum team was especially surprised to find traces of water-bearing sodium carbonate compounds, commonly known as soda ash, in the Bennu sample. These chemicals have never been found in ...

Analysing returned samples Tim McCoy (right), curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and research geologist Cari Corrigan examine scanning electron microscope ...

These specimens are from the U.S. National Mineral Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum ... As in this sample, these two minerals are found in association in Bennu.

A NASA mission collected the sample and brought ... Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and co-lead author of a new paper in the journal "Nature," about the Bennu samples.

The sample, which the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected from the asteroid Bennu and returned to Earth ... curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said in ...

The two previous asteroid sample missions, by Japan, yielded considerably less material. Small amounts of Bennu’s precious ... the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of meteorites.

"We're seeing minerals in Bennu samples that we have never seen before in a meteorite or any extraterrestrial sample," Tim McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural ...

Nearly 60 years later, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to ... D.C., and the Natural History Museum in London.

Ammonia, which is important for biochemical reactions, was discovered in the sample ... asteroids like Bennu flying about," explained Dr Ashley King, from the Natural History Museum.