Scientists found that asteroid Bennu contained a set of salty mineral deposits that formed in an exact sequence when a brine evaporated, leaving clues about the type of water that flowed billions of ...

The asteroid Bennu contains all the materials needed for life. This backs up an old hypothesis that the building blocks of ...

Some if not all of the delicate salts found at Bennu — similar to what’s in the dry lakebeds of California’s Mojave Desert and Africa’s Sahara — would be stripped away if present in ...

Scientists have detected organic compounds and minerals necessary for life in the samples collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission ...

But that doesn’t mean that Bennu hasn’t all at once become one of the most biologically interesting objects in the solar system. Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS ...

The Bennu samples contain 14 of the 20 amino acids that are essential for life on Earth to build proteins. Also found were ...

Bennu also contains all five amino acids that make up terrestrial genetic material. The NASA mission with the Osiris-Rex probe , which collected samples on Bennu and dropped them over the Earth in ...

Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday. The findings provide the ...

The sample, which the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected from the asteroid Bennu and returned to Earth in 2023, contains all five nucleobases — the "letters" that make up DNA and RNA — alongside ...

“This is all very exciting because it suggests that asteroids like Bennu once acted like giant chemical factories in space and could have also delivered the raw ingredients for life to Earth and ...