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

Engaging articles, breathtaking images and expert knowledge Issues delivered straight to your door What would happen if Earth ...

There are 20 amino acids that create the proteins required for life on our planet — and scientists have now found exactly 14 of them on an asteroid millions of miles away. The asteroid in question, ...

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

Rock and dust samples retrieved by NASA from the asteroid Bennu exhibit some of the chemical building blocks of life, according to research that provides some of the best evidence to date that such ...

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 ...

The origins of life on our planet remains one of science’s great mysteries. Now, a NASA mission that brought a piece of an ...

they can react with air and water in ways that can degrade any evidence of organics the meteorite might hold. OSIRIS-REx was designed to keep the samples pure and untouched by Earth, with ...

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 ...

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, ...

First off, in comparison to meteorites, which enter Earth's atmosphere while enduring a fiery reentry process before plummeting to the ground, the OSIRIS-REx samples are pristine due to the ...