101955 Bennu (provisional designation 1999 RQ 36) is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on 11 September 1999. It is a potentially hazardous object that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table and has the third highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale . [ 9 ]

Dec 20, 2024 · Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid that is about one-third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide at its equator. An ancient relic of our solar system’s early days, asteroid Bennu has seen more than 4.5 billion years of history.

Dec 17, 2024 · Bennu is a relatively small asteroid that passes close to Earth about every six years. Bennu was the target of NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft delivered a sample of Bennu to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023.

1 day ago · Walsh, K. J. et al. Numerical simulations suggest asteroids (101955) Bennu and (162173) Ryugu are likely second or later generation rubble piles. Nat. Commun. 15, 5653 (2024).

1 day ago · NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission returned 121.6 grams of sample from asteroid (101955) Bennu in September 2023—the largest sample ever returned to Earth. Now, an international team of OSIRIS-REx sample ...

Nov 21, 2024 · Scientists first caught sight of Bennu on Sept. 11, 1999, with a one-meter telescope near Socorro, New Mexico, during the Lincoln Laboratory Near Earth Research (LINEAR) survey. The asteroid was within 0.05 astronomical units of Earth (about 20 times the distance from Earth to the Moon).

Oct 16, 2020 · Bennu is a primordial artifact preserved in the vacuum of space, orbiting among planets and moons and asteroids and comets. Because it is so old, Bennu could be made of material containing molecules that were present when life first formed on Earth.

Sep 27, 2023 · Inside were tiny fragments from a rocky asteroid some 525m (1,722ft) across called "101955 Bennu". It is only the third time in history that material from an asteroid has been gathered and ...

101955 Bennu is a C-type asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on 11 September 1999. It is a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA), that has an orbit semi-major axis distance of 1.1264 AU.

Three-dimensional shape of near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu (provisional designation 1999 RQ36) based on radar images and optical lightcurves (Nolan et al., 2013). Bennu was observed both in 1999 at its discovery apparition, and in 2005 using the 12.6-cm radar at the Arecibo Observatory and the 3.5-cm radar at the Goldstone tracking station.