101955 Bennu (provisional designation 1999 RQ 36) is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on 11 September 1999. It is a potentially hazardous object that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table and has the third highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale . [ 9 ]

Feb 4, 2025 · Bennu is a relatively small asteroid that passes close to Earth about every six years. Bennu was the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and deliver it to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. Bennu is about one-third of a …

Dec 20, 2024 · Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid that is about one-third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide at its equator. An ancient relic of our solar system’s early days, asteroid Bennu has seen more than 4.5 billion years of history.

Oct 16, 2020 · Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid that hasn’t undergone drastic, composition-altering change, meaning that on and below its deeper-than-pitch-black surface are chemicals and rocks from the birth of the solar system.

11 hours ago · 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 ...

Nov 21, 2024 · Bennu was the target of NASA's first asteroid sample return mission – OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft successfully delivered the sample to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. Scientists first caught sight of Bennu on Sept. 11, 1999, with a one-meter telescope near Socorro, New Mexico, during the Lincoln Laboratory Near Earth Research (LINEAR) survey.

4 days ago · The 120 g of material came from the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, which OSIRIS-REx visited in 2020. The findings “bolster the hypothesis that asteroids like Bennu could have delivered the raw ingredients to Earth prior to the emergence of life,” Dan Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center tells Physics World.

Here we consider early OSIRIS-REx observations of Bennu to understand how the asteroid’s properties compare to pre-encounter expectations and to assess the prospects for sample return. The bulk composition of Bennu appears to be hydrated and volatile-rich, as expected.

Bennu is a very small asteroid whose orbit crosses the orbit of Earth. NASA JPL has classified Bennu as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" due to its predicted close pass(es) with Earth. Bennu orbits the sun every 437 days (1.20 years), coming as close as 0.90 AU and reaching as far as 1.36 AU from the sun.

Sep 27, 2023 · On Sunday (24 September) a small capsule crashed down onto the Utah desert, in the US, after travelling billions of miles across our Solar System. Inside were tiny fragments from a rocky asteroid...