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.

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 ...

Unique asteroid sample lands at the Field Museum 02:03. 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 ...

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’ ...

These specimens are from the U.S. National Mineral Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and show the minerals observed in Bennu samples as formed and found on Earth.

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 ...

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.

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.

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’ ...