NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly touched asteroid Bennu

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraftis meant to collect samples of dust and pebbles from asteroidBennu and deliver them back to Earth in 2023.
OSIRIS-Rexstands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.
This is NASA’s first mission meant to return a sample from the ancient asteroid.
Launched in 2016, it reached target in 2018.The departure window for the mission will open up in 2021, after which it will take over two years to reach back to Earth.
Asteroid Bennu:The asteroid was discovered by a team from the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team in 1999.
Scientists believe that it was formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system’s formation,implying that it is roughly 4.5 billion years old.
Because of Bennu’s age, it is likely to contain material that contains molecules that were present when life first formed on Earth,where life forms are based on carbon atom chains.