Cosmochemist Professor Frank Brenker shows three grains of a meteorite that the Goethe University team used to test research methods in advance. The quantity and type corresponded to the material from ...

Scientists studying samples from the asteroid Bennu have found that it contains a remarkable mix of materials — some of which formed long before the sun even existed. "It's very fascinating to see ...

Asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, led by the University of Arizona—is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few ...

A NASA spacecraft that will return a sample of a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu to Earth in 2023 made the first-ever close-up observations of particle plumes erupting from an asteroid’s surface.

Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday. The findings provide the ...

A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this ...

Scientists detected all five nucleobases -- building blocks of DNA and RNA -- in samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. Japanese collaborators detected all five nucleobases ...

Bennu is a roughly 0.3-mile-wide (500 meters) asteroid that orbits in near-Earth space. Scientists suspect it’s a chunk of a larger asteroid that broke off due to a collision farther out. Telescope ...

Since its discovery in 1999, the near-Earth asteroid Bennu has captivated scientists as a time capsule from the early solar system — and also as a key to possibly understanding the origins of life.