NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu and scientists got to dive into a tale of rock, ice and water that hints at how life could have formed on Earth.

A NASA spacecraft has returned asteroid samples that hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world.

The meteor fragments returned by OSIRIS-REx shed light on the entwined history of water and the chemical ingredients of life in the solar system.

This mineral-rich asteroid might have carried the seeds of life. Planetary scientists have discovered organic matter essential to life in dust and rock retrieved from an asteroid known as Bennu. The finding supports the theory that near-Earth asteroids,

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

Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers reveal that the samples contain precursors to life that formed in a watery environment—a watery environment very similar to the one that prevailed on Earth before life emerged up to four billion years ago.

Scientists have found all five nucelobases alongisde minerals essential for life as we know it on the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu.

Bennu’s parent asteroid, which formed around 4.5 billion years ago, seems to have been home to pockets of liquid water.

The building blocks for organic matter have been discovered on the asteroid Bennu, as deatiled in a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research gives new insight into how life originated on Earth and where we might find it elsewhere in the universe.

NASA researchers have been studying rock and dust brought back to Earth from the asteroid, Bennu. Those particles revealed what scientists call "the building blocks for life." Researchers found 14 of the 20 amino acids that life on Earth uses to make proteins.