One proposed way of examining if such a force could exist is by closely monitoring asteroid trajectories, and few near-Earth ...

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 is the ancient Egyptian deity linked with the Sun, creation and rebirth. Watch: How NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will bring Bennu asteroid sample back to Earth No solar eclipse glasses?

To reach Bennu, which orbits in a plane tilted six degrees from Earth's, OSIRIS-REx looped around the sun and then made a velocity-boosting gravity-assist flyby of Earth on Sept. 22, 2017.

Bennu has a 1 in nearly 1,800 chance to hit Earth in the next 300 years. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Asteroid Bennu is ...

Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is believed to be part of a larger asteroid that collided with another space rock. It’s about one-third of a mile wide and is roughly the height of the Empire ...

Asteroid Bennu today is characterized as a carbon-rich, rubble pile asteroid created through impacts, according to UA assistant professor Jessica Barnes. However, according to Barnes, ...

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 ...

Bennu is classified as a near-Earth asteroid (NEA), whose orbit keeps it within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, ...

An impact from Bennu would be very destructive, but Earth has seen worse. Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid that was roughly 6 miles wide (10 kilometers across) struck Earth, killing most ...