NASA’s first mission to sample an asteroid is moving ahead into development and testing in preparation for its launch in 2016. The Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security ...

The OSIRIS-REx project made history last year as the first U.S. mission to bring back an asteroid sample from space—and with it came a treasure trove of data. An international collaboration, led by ...

Life on Earth, as we know it, needs a few things to get off the ground. It needs an abundance of liquid water, a Goldilocks temperature that won't make said water freeze or boil, and a collection of a ...

NASA Planetary Scientist Noah Petro dishes on what it took plan the impressive touch-and-go return mission, why much of the ...

After years of anticipation and hard work by the mission team, the University of Arizona-led NASA OSIRIS-REx mission has successfully landed a capsule with rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu in ...

There are 20 amino acids that create the proteins required for life on our planet — and scientists have now found exactly 14 of them on an asteroid millions of miles away. The asteroid in question, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Several space missions have flown by asteroids before and gotten a peek at their compositions, but bringing a sample back to Earth ...

NASA’s third New Frontiers-class mission, the Osiris-Rex asteroid sample return probe, cleared a crucial decision point for development May 15 and is expected to proceed in preparation for launch to ...

Magnesium-sodium phosphate found in NASA's OSIRIS-Rex asteroid sample suggests Bennu, seen above, could have originated from an ancient, primitive ocean world. Credit: NASA What the team found was ...

An incredibly ambitious project to return samples from an asteroid has passed a major milestone, and has NASA's blessing to take the text step toward a launch in September 2016. Share on Facebook ...

China's Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return mission is set to launch this month, May 2025, en route to the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3). The country could join the United States and Japan, whose space ...