Bennu's size and orbit. Bennu is 1,614 feet (492 m) wide and has a fairly regular shape that looks a bit like a spinning top. The asteroid completes one orbit around the sun every 435 Earth days ...

Pinpointing an asteroid. Ever since Bennu’s discovery in September 1999, astronomers have carefully tracked the asteroid’s orbit with ground-based telescopes, including Puerto Rico’s iconic ...

The asteroid Bennu, as imaged by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The asteroid circles the sun at an average distance of 105 million miles, taking 1.2 years to complete one orbit while rotating on its ...

One proposed way of examining if such a force could exist is by closely monitoring asteroid trajectories, and few near-Earth ...

Bennu is classified as a near-Earth asteroid (NEA), whose orbit keeps it within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, ...

Bennu has an orbit that intersects with Earth’s own orbital path, so a return trip is less fuel-intensive than it might be from other asteroids within our reach.

The OSIRIS-REx team discovered evidence that Bennu likely originated well beyond the orbit of Saturn, before becoming a NEO (Near Earth Object) which would cause certain materials to evaporate ...

But is it going to hit? And why does September 24, 2182 keep getting mentioned?. First of all, Bennu was largely chosen for a visit by NASA's OSIRIS-REx due to the excellent radar data and ...

The scientists with the OSIRIS-REx mission believe Bennu has a one-in-2,700 chance of hitting a Texas-sized portion of Earth ...

The CI chondrites and asteroid Bennu. To learn about an asteroid – a rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sun – we started with a study of meteorites.. Asteroids like Bennu are rocky ...

However, new studies of the asteroid’s orbit have found that the asteroid probably won’t hit Earth before the year 2300. If you don’t know what Bennu is, ...

By traveling to Bennu, NASA researchers reasoned, a probe could gather pristine material. The OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at the 1,850-foot-wide asteroid in 2020, scooped up rock and dirt, and then ...