New research on a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu—a small portion of which should arrive in Canada soon—is offering a glimpse into how it came to be.
Studies published in Nature Astronomy and Nature Geoscience last week offer some insight into the granules that were collected and brought to Earth in September 2023 as part of NASA-led OSIRIS-REx mission.
The three studies, which include Canadian scholars, found that Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid, but its composition suggests the parent asteroid it split from contains materials from throughout the solar system.
“What they’ve done is they’ve looked at the origin and the formation and evolution of the Bennu sample to understand its history,” said Dr. Patrick Hill, program scientist at the Canadian Space Agency….