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Want a little reminder of how amazingly clever we humans can be? Yesterday, from a distance of more than 320 million kilometres (200 million miles) away, NASA scientists piloted a spacecraft to gently touch down on a spinning asteroid, collecting a sample of surface rubble to bring back home to Earth. At 6:08 PM EDT, the signal from spacecraft OSIRIS-REx reached Earth to let us know that it had successfully touched down at the Nightingale collection site on asteroid Bennu, within a metre (three feet) of its target, and safely bounced back up again after just 6 seconds of contact....

After orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Bennu for nearly two years, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully touched down and reached out its robotic arm to collect a sample from the asteroid's surface on Tuesday. That sample will be returned to Earth in 2023. To achieve this historic first for NASA, a van-size spacecraft had to briefly touch down its arm in a landing site called Nightingale. The site is the width of a few parking spaces. The arm reached out to collect a sample, which could be between 2 ounces and 2 kilograms. Then, the spacecraft backed away to safety.

Tuesday, October 20 1:20 to 6:30 p.m. – Live stream animation displaying OSIRIS-REx’s sample collection activities in real time. The animation commences with the spacecraft’s slew into position for the Orbit Departure Maneuver and runs through the entire sequence of TAG events, concluding after the spacecraft’s back-away burn. Event will be broadcast on the mission’s website. 5 to 6:30 p.m. – Live broadcast from Lockheed Martin of OSIRIS-REx’s descent to the surface of Bennu and attempt at sample collection. Hosted by Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, and Michelle Thaller, science communicator at Goddard, the broadcast...

In just a few days, NASA is going to bounce its probe OSIRIS-REx off asteroid Bennu. The mission will collect a sample from the asteroid, and return it to Earth for closer study - one of the first missions of its kind. That return sample will help us to understand not just asteroids, but the earliest days of the Solar System's existence. However, that is not the sole mission of OSIRIS-REx. The probe arrived in Bennu orbit in December of 2018, and since that time has been using its suite of instruments to learn as much as it can about...

OSIRIS-REx — an international sample-return mission led by NASA and joined by science team members from Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and with an instrument provided through the Canadian Space Agency — is less than one month away from performing a Touch-And-Go sample collection maneuver to return portions of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Meanwhile, science teams have observed regular material shedding activity from the near Earth object — an unexpected find that allows scientists to better understand the dynamic little worlds littered throughout the inner solar system.

The probe has been orbiting the asteroid since 2018 and has been preparing to collect a chunk of asteroid rock, which it will bring back to Earth in 2023. OSIRIS-REx is set to take the sample from the site named Nightingale on Oct. 20, 2020, but on May 26 the spacecraft took a dive toward Osprey, the backup sample collection site for the mission. OSIRIS-REx dropped down to just 820 feet (250 meters) above the site, which is the closest the spacecraft has been to Osprey. During the operation, the probe took 347 images from PolyCam, one of three cameras...

While it has a face only an astrogeologist could love, that rubble could be as old as the solar system itself. Bennu is also number two on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard scale, meaning there’s a (slight) chance it could impact Earth very violently in around 150 years. And now, Bennu has the distinction of being the subject of the highest resolution mosaic ever made of any planetary body. The image was collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft between March 7th and April 19th, 2019. At the time, it was about 2 to 3 miles from the surface of the 1,600...

More space rocks seem to be approaching Earth’s territory, and a new report reveals another one may bring in disasters. NASA has spotted an asteroid traveling at 63,000 miles per hour, and there is a possibility that it can impact the Earth. Express reports that the space agency recently tracked down an asteroid named 101955 Bennu but formally known as 1999 RQ36, hurtling towards Earth at a rapid speed of 63,000 miles per hour. NASA has not only labeled this a Potentially Hazardous Object or PHO, but they have also classified RQ36 with the second-highest rating on the Palermo Technical...

NASA Prepares to Snatch Samples of ‘Apocalypse Asteroid’ Bennu in 2020 as it Zooms Through Space 10:05 14.08.2019 Considered a “silent witness to titanic events in the solar system’s 4.6 billion year history” by NASA researchers, Bennu is a 1,600-foot rock that was branded an "apocalypse asteroid", located between Earth and Mars, weighing 87 million tonnes and currently orbiting the Sun. A NASA mission has spent over 8 months sizing up the massive asteroid Bennu, located between Earth and Mars, to finally select four areas on its surface as possible sampling sites for its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to grab a piece...

The English tabloid Express ran a story today (Feb. 11) with the headline "NASA warn 'APOCALYPSE asteroid' Bennu WILL appear in the sky this Valentine's Day." The piece claimed that the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid Bennu — "a doomsday asteroid which has a high probability of impacting Earth in one hundred years time" — will be "visible to the naked eye" on the night of Feb. 14, slightly to the right of Mars. This is entirely wrong. First of all, Bennu is not an "apocalypse asteroid," and NASA never labeled it such. (Agency scientists aren't known for their hyperbolic and...

Bennu has a shape that looks a bit like a spinning top. It is roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter and orbits the sun once every 1.2 years, or 436.604 days. Every six years or so, it comes very close to Earth — about 0.002 AU, according to the University of Arizona. (... well within the orbit of Earth's moon.) Bennu is part of a small class of carbonaceous (dark) asteroids that likely have primitive materials in them. Called a B-type class, Bennu and other asteroids like it have materials such as volatiles (compounds with a low boiling point),...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft has obtained new images of Bennu, a 1,614-foot (492 m) wide asteroid that orbits the Sun relatively close to the Earth.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Benniu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a manmade spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system. You can watch the livestream of the arrival here:

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its targeted asteroid, Bennu, on Monday, December 3, 2018, at approximately 17:00 UTC (noon EST). Translate UTC to your time. NASA will air a live event from 16:45 to 17:15 UTC (11:45 a.m.to 12:15 p.m. EST) to highlight the arrival of the agency’s first asteroid sample return mission. You can watch on NASA TV, Facebook Live, Ustream, YouTube and NASA Live. NASA TV also will air an arrival preview program starting at 16:15 UTC (11:15 a.m. EST). OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and has been...

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its final approach toward the big near-Earth asteroid Bennu on Friday (Aug. 17), NASA officials said. The milestone also marks the official start of OSIRIS-REx's "asteroid operations" mission phase, they added. OSIRIS-REx is still about 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Bennu and won't arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) space rock until Dec. 3. The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — launched on Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If all goes according to...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A U.S. space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said on Tuesday. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to dispatch the robot explorer Osiris-Rex on a seven-year mission. United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Osiris-Rex is headed to a 1,640-foot (500-meter) wide asteroid named Bennu, which circles the...

Paging Bruce Willis! NASA is planning to launch a probe to study an asteroid that could one day pulverize the Earth. The asteroid, named Bennu, crosses Earth’s orbit once every six years and has gotten ever closer since it was discovered in 1999, astronomers told the Sunday Times of London (paywall). In 2135, Bennu will fly between the moon and Earth — a hair’s breadth in space terms, the Times reported. That’s so close that gravity from the Earth could effect Bennu’s orbit, “potentially putting it on course for the Earth later that century,” said Dante Lauretta, a professor of...