Target of Asteroid Mission OSIRIS-REx Got a New Name: Bennu

The Asteroid that was selected to be explored by a NASA mission has a new name, after a naming contest involving thousands of young students around the world. A third-grade student in North Carolina won with his entry 'Bennu', the name of an Egyptian avian deity. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is planned to visit the asteroid after a launch in 2016, rendezvous with Bennu in 2018 and return a sample of the asteroid to Earth in 2023.

TAGSAM will collect a sample from Bennu and store it for return to Earth. The sample is hoped to hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of water and organic molecules that may have contributed to the development of life on Earth. The mission will be a vital part of NASA's plans to find, study, capture and relocate an asteroid for exploration by astronauts. NASA recently announced an asteroid initiative proposing a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for the first human mission to an asteroid while also accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids.

The name for the carbon-rich asteroid,, is the winning entry in an international student contest. Nine-year-old Michael Puzio suggested the name for the asteroid, until now only designated as (101955) 1999 RQ36, because he imagined the Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm and solar panels on OSIRIS-REx look like the neck and wings in drawings of Bennu, which Egyptians usually depicted as a gray heron. Puzio wrote the name suits the asteroid because it means "the ascending one," or "to shine."

More than 8,000 students, all younger than 18, from more than 25 countries worldwide entered the "Name that Asteroid!" contest last year.

"Bennu struck a chord with many of us right away," said Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society and a contest judge. "While there were many great entries, the similarity between the image of the heron and the TAGSAM arm of OSIRIS-REx was a clever choice. The parallel with asteroids as both bringers of life and as destructive forces in the solar system also created a great opportunity to teach."

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Program survey team discovered the asteroid in 1999, early in NASA's Near-Earth Objects Observation Program, which detects and catalogs near-Earth asteroids and comets.