Daniella Mendoza DellaGiustina

After months of frustration, NASA finally got the Bennu asteroid sample container open in January, revealing the large amounts of asteroid scooped up by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Now, a top member of the mission says the distant hunk of space rock may be a planetesimal—a planet’s building block—that once belonged to an ocean world.'More People Need to Know About This History': A Black Astronaut Speaks About Race and SpaceDante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and principal investigator on the…

New mission, who dis? The spacecraft formerly known as OSIRIS-REx had an impromptu close encounter with the Sun as it follows a newly crafted route to a second asteroid, using one of its solar arrays for shade.Let’s Eat a Chocolate Xbox ControllerYou may remember NASA’s diligent spacecraft that snagged a sample from an asteroid and dropped it off in the Utah desert in September 2023. That same spacecraft is on a bonus mission to a different asteroid, but in order to get there, it’ll need to fly 25 million miles closer to…

The prominent astrophysicist and musician Brian May is co-authoring a three-dimensional atlas of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, an 85-million-ton hunk of rock orbiting the Sun.Inspiration Behind Immortal Longings | io9 InterviewMay is co-authoring the book with Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of NASA and the university’s OSIRIS-REx mission. May is also part of the mission team.OSIRIS-REx saw a small spacecraft arrive at Bennu in 2018 and extract a sample of…