Credit: NASA "We're seeing minerals in Bennu samples that we have never seen before in a meteorite or any extraterrestrial ...

This was the first U.S. asteroid sample return ... examined similar minerals in the museum’s collection and consulted with ...

The reports detail the mineralogy and chemistry of a sample taken from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, which was brought home by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Origins, Spectral ...

Professor Sara Russell, a cosmic mineralogist at the Natural History Museum in London and the ... discovered 11 different minerals in the sample from Bennu, including calcite, halite and sylvite.

A sample fresh from an asteroid avoids this fate, allowing scientists to study its unaltered chemistry. Bennu isn’t just a carbonaceous asteroid, but one that is surprisingly close-by.

London’s Natural History Museum and Universities across the world. Professor Jones added: “These results were only possible because of the extremely careful curation of the Bennu sample from the ...