Asteroid Bennu Has an Identity Crisis, and Jupiter Might Be to Blame

What happened

So when a half a gram of the material made its way to ETH Zurich, Maria Schönbächler and her lab began analyzing it immediately. Asteroid sample return missions have brought well preserved samples of the early solar system (that hadn’t been roasted in a fireball) back to Earth for the first time.

But those samples, like the OSIRIS-REx sample from asteroid (101955) Bennu, sometimes provide more questions than answers. A new paper, published in Science Advances from researchers at ETH Zurich and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, highlights one of those questions - why Bennu appears to have been born in both the inner and outer solar system - and a possible answer to it.

Asteroid Bennu Has an Identity Crisis, and Jupiter Might Be to Blame By Andy Tomaswick - October 02, 2026 10:00 AM UTC | Planetary Science Asteroid sample return missions have brought well preserved samples of the early solar system (that hadn’t been roasted in a fireball) back to Earth for the first time. Samples from Bennu are one of the most sought after resources in the world of geology. Isotopes acted like markers in the early solar system.