101955 Bennu is a B-type near-Earth asteroid. NASA's OSIRIS-REx operated in its vicinity from December 2018 to May 2021 and delivered 121.6 g of its regolith to the Utah Test and Training Range in September 2023. The figure is the OSIRIS-REx shape model, a spinning-top form with an equatorial ridge.
Bennu is an Apollo-class near-Earth asteroid on a 1.195-year, Earth-crossing orbit. The path is propagated from JPL osculating elements at epoch 2026 June 19 and cross-checked against JPL Horizons. The view is rotatable and zoomable; the date is set by the slider or by the Live now control.
Orbit: JPL Horizons osculating elements for 101955 Bennu (record 101955, solution #118, Farnocchia et al. 2021), epoch 2026-06-19 — exact at epoch, two-body thereafter. Planets: JPL/Standish. Earth MOID 0.00322 au. Bennu is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid; the cumulative impact probability through 2300 is 1 in 1750, concentrated on 2182 September 24.
101955 Bennu was discovered on 1999 September 11 by the LINEAR survey and selected as the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft arrived on 2018 December 3, surveyed the asteroid until 2021 May 10, executed a touch-and-go collection at the Nightingale site on 2020 October 20, and returned 121.6 g of regolith on 2023 September 24 — the largest asteroid sample returned to date.
The rendered geometry is the OSIRIS-REx reconstruction, loaded from Data/worlds/bennu/bennu.obj and shaded matte grey to approximate a geometric albedo of 0.044. No texture is applied; the equatorial ridge and the boulder distribution are carried by the mesh. Absence of the model file is reported in place of the figure.
The orbit is constrained by radar ranging, optical astrometry and OSIRIS-REx radio tracking (Farnocchia et al. 2021). The map propagates the JPL Horizons osculating elements for solution #118 in the two-body approximation, reproducing the Horizons state vector at the epoch; the Horizons lamp and the Live now control query body_server.py at /api/bennu/ephem for an independent cross-check. Planetary positions use JPL/Standish elements via solar-bodies.js.
The feed queries /api/bennu/latest (NASA ADS or arXiv) and falls back to a snapshot in Data/worlds/bennu/research.json. Card values are checked against the primary OSIRIS-REx literature.
Bennu is highlighted in cyan on a map of uniquely named solar-system bodies — planets, dwarf planets, named asteroids and comets — together with the interstellar objects and escaping spacecraft, each plotted at its current position and linked to its source record.