Researchers believe this 4.6-billion-year-old piece of rock could reveal compounds present at the beginning of the solar system and the building blocks of life.

The Field Museum is the new temporary home to a tiny piece of pristine asteroid. The fragment of the asteroid Bennu, on loan from NASA, won't be on display for visitors, but will give scientists the ...

The Field Museum is the new temporary home to a tiny piece of pristine asteroid. The fragment of the asteroid Bennu, on loan from NASA, won't be on display for visitors, but will give scientists the ...

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 ...

A Bennu sample on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History after it was unveiled to museumgoers Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. James Di Loreto and Phillip R. Lee, Smithsonian. A new ...

This 3D rendering shows an animation of a Bennu sample on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Scott Eckley/NASA JSC A ‘soup of the elements’ ...

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 ...

An artist’s impression of OSIRIS-REx digging into Bennu. Image: NASA. The OSIRIS-REx team collected more than twice the amount of asteroid material they had initially hoped to gather (4.29 ...

A sample from the asteroid Bennu, the subject of the 2016 OSIRIS-REx mission, and a “near-Earth asteroid,” has arrived at the Field Museum.

This 3D rendering shows an animation of a Bennu sample on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Scott Eckley/NASA JSC A ‘soup of the elements’ ...

The sample was collected from Bennu in October 2020 by a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx, or Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer.