A team of US astronomers has carried out one of the deepest analyses to date of a sample from the asteroid Bennu, revealing new details about how water and organic material interacted during the ...

Scientists studying Bennu samples have discovered that its chemistry is far from uniform. Organic compounds and minerals cluster into three distinct types of regions, each shaped differently by past ...

Life on Earth may have origins from far, far away. Scientists have found a full set of life-building molecules in a nearly pristine asteroid sample, and the discovery suggests that the necessary ...

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Scientists say they are studying a surprise from space. NASA recently released scans of the Bennu Asteroid from the agency's Osiris-Rex Mission. Using older Earth scans and ...

TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) - NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission faced an unexpected challenge when its target, asteroid Bennu, revealed a rugged landscape filled with large boulders instead of the anticipated smooth ...

These are X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scans of particles from asteroid Bennu. They show the most common types of crack networks observed in Bennu samples. Credits: NASA/Scott Eckley To test ...

In one of the biggest surprises of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders, with few of the smooth patches that earlier ...

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 ...

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 Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of ...

Penn State researchers think a key ingredient for life may have formed in deep freeze, not in a warm asteroid puddle. Scientists at Penn State; led by geoscientist Allison Baczynski and postdoctoral ...

Asteroid Bennu was expected to be relatively smooth and easy to sample. When OSIRIS-REx arrived, it found a surface covered almost entirely in massive boulders. Safe landing zones shrank to areas no ...