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 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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

OSIRIS-REx also discovered that Bennu’s orbit is changing. A “day” on Bennu lasts a short 4 hours and 17.8 minutes. But that’s enough to heat up the asteroid’s dayside.

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.

Five science instruments mapped Bennu's chemistry and mineralogy to determine the effect of sunlight on the asteroid's orbit. Cost of the mission, excluding launch, is $800 million.

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 ...