With rubble from an asteroid tucked inside, a NASA spacecraft fired its engines and began the long journey back to Earth on Monday, leaving the ancient space rock in its rearview mirror. The trip home for the robotic prospector, Osiris-Rex, will take two years. Osiris-Rex reached asteroid Bennu in 2018 and spent two years flying
After more than a decade of work, $800 million and 200 million miles of space travel, it all came down to six seconds. That’s how long OSIRIS-REx spent on the surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu, collecting a small sample of soil before lifting off again for a return trip to Earth. But those six seconds
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission, launched on Sept. 8, 2016, is the first U.S. mission designed to retrieve a pristine sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth for further study. The mission’s target is Bennu, a carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid that is potentially hazardous, representing an approximately 1 in 2,700 chance of impacting the Earth late
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