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Bennu

SPACE: NASA Just Snagged a Bit of Asteroid Rock to Bring Home (Hopefully)

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OSIRIS-REx at Bennu - NASA

For the first time ever, a NASA probe has performed a sample-snagging operation on an asteroid in deep space. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spiraled down to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 20) to grab material that mission team members hope harbors clues about the solar system’s early days and the rise of life on Earth. “We did it!” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona, said during a webcast that provided updates about the maneuver. “We tagged the surface of the asteroid, and it’s up to Bennu now to see how the … Read more

NASA Probe Makes Tantalizing Find – Live Science

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Asteroid Bennu

It looks like NASA chose the right space rock for its asteroid-sampling mission. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx probe, which just arrived at Bennu last week, has already found hydrated minerals on the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, mission team members announced yesterday (Dec. 10). The discovery suggests that liquid water was once plentiful in the interior of Bennu’s parent body, which scientists think was a roughly 62-mile-wide (100 kilometers) rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Bennu is likely a pile of rubble that coalesced after a massive impact shattered that larger object hundreds of millions of years … Read more