OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta poses in front of the payload fairing. He has been working on this project since 2004 and said he is excited for the launch. Rex Englelhardt, mission ...

There are 20 amino acids that create the proteins required for life on our planet — and scientists have now found exactly 14 of them on an asteroid millions of miles away. The asteroid in question, ...

NASA OSIRIS-REx sample collection event at Asteroid Bennu saw the spacecraft plunge its arm into the surface. Find out how ...

NASA's first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, reached the asteroid Bennu only a week ago, but it's already learning more about this time capsule from the early solar system. OSIRIS-REx, ...

The OSIRIS-REx project made history last year as the first U.S. mission to bring back an asteroid sample from space—and with it came a treasure trove of data. An international collaboration, led by ...

Stream now with KPBS Passport on KPBS+ / Watch Tuesday, July 7, 2026 at 11:30 p.m. on KPBS TV. The half-hour documentary follows a multi-generational team of scientists and engineers as they struggle ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. While the odds of Bennu impacting Earth may sound alarming, they're not entirely unexpected. "On average, medium-sized asteroids ...

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 $800 million OSIRIS-Rex mission brought home about a half-cup of crushed rocks and dirt from asteroid Bennu in 2023. Credit: NASA Goddard / University of Arizona illustration In one study, a ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully returned a generous chunk of the asteroid Bennu to Earth in 2023, and scientists have been analyzing it ever since. International scientific teams have published ...