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, ...

The discovery is a capstone achievement for NASA, which went to great lengths to secure and deliver asteroid samples from ...

Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers ...

Scientists detected all five nucleobases -- building blocks of DNA and RNA -- in samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

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

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

Scientists studying samples that NASA collected from the asteroid Bennu found a wide assortment of organic molecules that ...

Rock and dust samples retrieved by NASA from the asteroid Bennu exhibit some of the chemical building blocks of life, ...

Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, holds fascinating clues about the origins of organic molecules in ou.

The Bennu discovery helps to illuminate how, early in the Solar System’s history, asteroids and other planetary building blocks were not just “lumps of stone and ice, but active ‘living’ objects”, ...