OSIRIS-REx MISSION / ASTEROID BENNU

Bennu

• Bennu is an asteroid located about 200 million miles away from the Earth.
  
  
• Bennu is named after an Egyptian deity. The asteroid was discovered by a team from the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team in 1999.
  
  
• Bennu is a B-type asteroid, implying that it contains significant amounts of carbon and various other minerals.
  
  

Significance of bennu

• Bennu is considered to be an ancient asteroid that has not gone through a lot of composition-altering change through billions of years, which means that below its surface lie chemicals and rocks from the birth of the solar system.
  
  
• Therefore, scientists and researchers are interested in studying this asteroid as it might give them clues about the origins of the solar system, the sun, the Earth and the other planets.