OSIRIS-REx isn't done yet. After swinging past Earth to drop off the Bennu Sample, it is now headed out to intercept the orbit of asteroid Apophis. In doing so, OSIRIS-REx was officially renamed ...

When NASA launched a spacecraft to an asteroid, scientists patiently waited for their chance to look at bits of the space ...

Scientists have detected organic compounds and minerals necessary for life in the samples collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu.

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

In 2018, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission reached asteroid 101955 Bennu. Two years later, the spacecraft snagged a sample of its ...

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

All forms of Earth life have specific chemicals in their makeup, such as amino acids and sugars. Scientists have known that ...

The first compound the team discovered in the Bennu sample was sodium carbonate, which had never been observed before in any other asteroid or meteorite. As it incorporates water into its crystal ...

The OSIRIS-REx mission returned to the sample to Earth in September of 2023, and these studies show that it contains amino acids, nucleobases, and minerals known as evaporites—all elements of life’s ...

Scientists from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission recently delivered remarkable findings about asteroid 101955 Bennu after the mission returned its samples to Earth in 2023.

Molecules friendly to life have been found in samples of the asteroid Bennu, which NASA collected with a robotic probe five years ago.

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. It marked the ...