A near-Earth asteroid which will be visited by a NASA spacecraft in 2018 now has a more approachable name — “Bennu” — thanks to a North Carolina third-grader.
Nine-year-old Michael Puzio’s suggestion beat out more than 8,000 other entries in an international student contest that sought to rename potentially dangerous asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36, which is the target of NASA’s Osiris-Rex sample-return mission.