Bill Nye Helps Send NASA Asteroid-Sampling Spacecraft Off in Style

A few special guests showed up to see the launch of NASA's asteroid-sampling spacecraft yesterday (Sept. 8). OSIRIS-REx is now chasing down a 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid named Bennu, on a seven-year mission to snag samples of the space rock and send the material back to Earth. Bennu was known as 1999 RQ36 until 2013, when 9-year-old Mike Puzio won a Planetary Society contest to give the asteroid a more fitting and memorable name.