All forms of Earth life have specific chemicals in their makeup, such as amino acids and sugars. Scientists have known that ...

When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate, and ammonia. Together, ...

Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system. Nearly 60 ...

New findings reveal that a NASA mission traveled to an asteroid that may have once been covered in salty lakes containing ...

The Bennu samples contain 14 of the 20 amino acids that are essential for life on Earth to build proteins. Also found were all five of the basic building block for life — Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, ...

The OSIRIS-REx mission returned to the sample to Earth in September of 2023, and these studies show that it contains amino acids, nucleobases, and minerals known as evaporites—all elements of life’s ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully returned a generous ... A similar asteroid that arrived on Earth as a meteorite would have lost many compounds due to heat and exposure to the atmosphere.

we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite. Before returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work ...

It took a while for scientists to gain access to the samples that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took from the asteroid Bennu, but the wait is proving to be worth it. A new study published January 29 in ...