On Nov. 14, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft stretched out its robotic sampling arm for the first time in space. The arm, more formally known as the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), is key to the spacecraft achieving the...

On Sept. 14, OSIRIS-REx’s REXIS instrument opened its radiation cover, as scheduled, after two years in space. The cover had been in place to protect REXIS’s charge-coupled devices (CCDs) from degradation due to radiation exposure...

On Sept. 12, OSIRIS-REx pointed its medium-range science camera, MapCam, toward asteroid Bennu 621,000 miles (one million kilometers) in the distance. Slewing gently side to side and up and down as it captured 64 images, the spacecraft...

It began with dust. Before there were asteroids, or planets, or people – about 4.6 billion years ago – a cloud of dust and gas swirled in the cosmos. At the center, a star began to form. With heat and shock waves, clumps of this...

When Asteroid Bennu was discovered on Sept. 11, 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project (LINEAR), it was called 1999 RQ36 -- a provisional designation assigned by the Minor Planet Center. After follow-up observations...