The proposed national US budget for 2026 contains a few nasty surprises for NASA, and some serious disappointments—among them ...

NASA tasked the OSIRIS-REx team that retrieved material from Bennu to examine it for clues to the nature and origins of life. ... such as DNA and RNA. Plus, the team found salts, ...

OSIRIS-REx, the first US mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, launched in 2016. In 2020, it gathered a sample from Bennu and returned it to Earth in 2023. These uncontaminated samples help ...

OSIRIS-REx rejoined Earth’s solar orbit and dropped its sample capsule into our atmosphere in September of 2023. And after all of that, the capsule’s parachute failed. Its first parachute.

Analysing returned samples Tim McCoy (right), curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and research geologist Cari Corrigan examine scanning electron microscope ...

The OSIRIS-REx sample containment pod is shown here, shortly after touching down in October 2023. (NASA) "The only way this could be discovered is because of controlled sample return by a ...

Use precise geolocation data and actively scan device characteristics for identification. This is done to store and access ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission already is rewriting the textbook on what we understand about the beginnings of our solar system. Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s history, and Bennu’s ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission delivered samples from asteroid Bennu, revealing crucial molecules linked to life, including amino acids and nucleobases found in DNA and RNA. The presence of ammonia and ...

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life were astonishingly widespread in the early solar ... DNA and RNA.” ...

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 ...

Asteroid Bennu seems to have come from a long-lost world on the fringes of the solar system, where saltwater pooled and dried over thousands of years and life’s basic ingredients were widespread.