Dust from asteroid Bennu is revealing a surprising origin story for life’s building blocks. New research suggests some amino acids formed in frozen ice exposed to radiation, not warm liquid water as ...

Tiny grains of dust from asteroid Bennu are reshaping how scientists think life’s ingredients formed in space.

Did the ingredients for life as we know it exist in the early solar system? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academ | Space ...

Penn State researchers think a key ingredient for life may have formed in deep freeze, not in a warm asteroid puddle. A space sample with a new twistScientists at Penn State; led by geoscientist ...

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an ...

The discovery is just the latest to come from the asteroid sample, which dates back to the dawn of the solar system.

The asteroid, named Bennu, contains sugars necessary for the development of life as well as a “gum-like” substance never before found on any space rock Samples of Bennu were first delivered to earth ...

Asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, led by the University of Arizona—is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — New results from OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, reveals why some gray asteroids reflect light at different wavelengths, like red or blue, more strongly ...

"Bennu is a time capsule of the material that was throughout the solar system." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Breaking space ...

Jessica Barnes examines a vial containing sample particles at the Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory for Astromaterials Analysis, located at the University of Arizona. Asteroid Bennu — the target of NASA's ...