• After traveling for over 4 billion miles (6.2 billion kilometers) to reach Asteroid Bennu and then make the journey home, the OSIRIS-REx probe released its sample return capsule while it was about 63,000 miles (101,000 km) above Earth.
• The capsule contains some 250 grams (8.8 ounces) of rocks and other material from Bennu.
• This material could help answer some of scientists’ most burning questions about the origins of life on Earth and the early days of our solar system.

JAXA has two such missions under its belt. That agency’s Hayabusa 1 collected materials from asteroid Itokawa and returned them in 2010, and Hayabusa 2 returned sampled of asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

ABOUT OSIRIS-REX

• OSIRIS-Rex stands for (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security- Regolith Explorer).
• It is NASA’s first mission to collect an asteroid sample.
• Timeline
  • launched in 2016,
  • arrived at Bennu in 2018 and
  • collected samples of the asteroid in
• Manufactured by Lockheed Martin Space systems.

ABOUT BENNU ASTEROID

• It is located about 200 million miles away from the Earth and was formed in first 10 million years of solar system’s creations.
• It 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.
• It was discovered by a team from the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team in 1999.
• Bennu is a B-type asteroid, i.e., it contains significant amounts of carbon and various other minerals.