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 ...

Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source and Molecular Foundry provided powerful tools to study asteroid samples returned by NASA ...

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 ...

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 ...

"Our findings, which contribute to the larger picture painted by all the authors of the paper, indicate that nucleobase chemistry in the Bennu samples must be further studied," says Naraoka.

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 ...