NASA Planetary Scientist Noah Petro dishes on what it took plan the impressive touch-and-go return mission, why much of the ...

This artist's illustration shows NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft zooming past Earth on Sept. 22, 2017 — a maneuver designed to boost the probe’s speed and refine its course toward the asteroid Bennu.

A portion of the asteroid Bennu sample delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, set into a microscope slide at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Credit: Molly ...

Tim McCoy, right, and Cari Corrigan, meteorite researchers at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, look at images of asteroid Bennu samples taken by a scanning electron microscope.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned with samples from Bennu in 2023. Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid. The samples contained the building blocks of life and provide more evidence that asteroids may ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Scientists have identified life’s key ingredients and signs of the stew needed to mix them in asteroid samples brought back to Earth by a University of Arizona-led space mission. The rocks and dust ...

A pristine asteroid sample that could serve as a time capsule from the early days of our solar system has finally been revealed. The rocks and dust contain water and a large amount of carbon, said ...