NASA set to launch first asteroid dust-retrieval mission

The unmanned spacecraft, known as OSIRIS-REx, is poised to blast off at 7:05 pm (23:05 GMT) atop an Atlas V rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The $800 million mission will travel for two years on a journey to Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid about the size of a small mountain. Bennu was chosen from the some 500,000 asteroids in the solar system because it orbits close to Earth's path around the sun, it is the right size for scientific study, and it is one of the oldest asteroids known to NASA.