This spherical container has been engineered to house the most scientifically valuable cargo imaginable: samples brought back from the Red Planet. Still probably many years in the future and most ...

About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its ...

In September, fragments of a near-Earth asteroid were carefully dropped off in the Utah desert. The space rocks hold clues to the origin of the solar system and can possibly answer crucial questions ...

NASA has collected a small amount of the rock and dust sample that its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft brought back from the asteroid Bennu. However, it is having a bit of trouble accessing the rest. That's ...

You’d think grabbing a scoop of dirt off an orbiting space rock and then delivering it back to Earth would be the most complicated part of an asteroid sample collection mission, but the real challenge ...

Responding to an independent review of NASA's ambitious Mars Sample Return mission, agency officials said Monday they will seek fresh ideas from agency engineers, researchers and the private sector to ...

It took OSIRIS-REx years to reach the asteroid Bennu, scoop up a sample, and return it to Earth. While NASA scientists were anxious to get a look at the sample when the spacecraft dropped it off in ...