American Space Probe Begins its Trek Home With Asteroid Dust From Bennu

On Monday, the US space probe OSIRIS-REx left the asteroid Bennu, from which it collected dust samples last year, to begin its 1.4 billion-mile journey back to Earth.

According to international reports, NASA's space probe mission has embarked on its long trek home after spending two years on asteroid Bennu.

In a step toward understanding how the planets were formed and how life originated on Earth, the global agency launched this high-risk operation in October 2020. Moreover, the spaceship was sent to explore outer space and also to study Bennu, an asteroid around the size of the Empire State Building and 200 million miles away, between the orbit of Earth and Mars.

On September 8, 2016, the space probe launched aboard an Atlas V rocket. Since then, the probe has been mapping the surface of Bennu, breaking the record for the closest-ever orbit of a planetary body by a spacecraft.

Notably, the American spacecraft will drop a time capsule containing a sample of rock from outer space into the Utah desert on 24 September 2023.

In 1999, the Bennu asteroid was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, which detects and tracks near-Earth objects.

The asteroid is about half a kilometer wide at its equator - only just wider than the Empire State Building's height, according to Nasa. It worth mentioning that it makes a close approach to Earth every six years.