That’s why NASA launched a mission to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2016. In 2020, the OSIRIS-REx mission made history by successfully collecting a sample from the asteroid. This was the first U.S.

Researchers are unlocking secrets of our solar system by analyzing asteroid Bennu samples, some of the most pristine ever ...

The Bennu samples contain 14 of the 20 amino acids that are essential for life on Earth to build proteins. Also found were ...

But samples taken directly out of an asteroid like Bennu, which has been floating around in the cold vacuum of space for billions of years, preserve a pristine ancient snapshot. Water and a high ...

HUMANS have come a step closer to finding aliens after the “building blocks for life” were discovered by scientists on an ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu and scientists got to dive into a tale ...

Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers ...

Bennu may have once provided a compatible environment. Another study in Nature detected a cornucopia of minerals akin to brine on Earth—potentially a sign of water in the past. These salt-crusted ...

NASA scientists found amino acids, key minerals, and nucleobases for DNA in samples from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission.

Bennu has long intrigued researchers due to its near-Earth orbit and carbon-rich composition. Scientists theorized that the ...

Bennu’s highly unlikely impact with Earth—which could happen in 157 years—could cause a global winter and drought, modeling ...