Bennu is also expected to pass closer to Earth than the moon in 2135 and if it does, our planet's gravitational pull could put it on the path to striking Earth on September 24, 2182.

Bennu arrives at the Museum ‘We're really lucky,’ says Dr Ashley King, a meteorite researcher at the Natural History Museum, who will be part of the team studying the pieces of Bennu.‘We're one of the ...

Bennu was also an attractive target because it skirts the asteroid belt, which circles the sun between Mars and Jupiter. At its closest, the asteroid is 200 million miles from Earth. While still a ...

In 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached asteroid 101955 Bennu. Two years later, the spacecraft snagged a sample of its surface, which has since been returned to Earth. Now, astronomers are ...

Bennu’s parent body formed 4.5 billion years ago and once contained pockets of liquid water. As the water evaporated, brines ...

The CI chondrites and asteroid Bennu. To learn about an asteroid – a rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sun – we started with a study of meteorites.. Asteroids like Bennu are rocky ...

The mission, which launched on Sept. 8, 2016, targeting the primordial asteroid Bennu, believed to have remained largely unchanged since the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.

Bennu orbits at an average speed of 63,000 miles per hour. Once close to Earth, it takes around 1.2 years to orbit the sun fully, and rotates once every 4.3 hours.

Despite the slightly higher chance of impact, the risks from Bennu shouldn’t keep anyone awake at night. There’s more than a 99.9 percent chance that Bennu will not hit Earth in the next three ...

The asteroid Bennu is puzzling scientists, with samples from the space rock showing weirder properties than they expected. These include extremely high nitrogen levels and improbably magnetic ...