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

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.