That’s why NASA launched a mission to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2016. In 2020, the OSIRIS-REx mission made history by successfully collecting a sample from the asteroid. This was the first U.S.

In October 2020, a van-sized robotic spacecraft briefly touched down on the surface of Bennu, a 525-meter-wide asteroid 320 ...

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

Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers ...

But samples taken directly out of an asteroid like Bennu, which has been floating around in the cold vacuum of space for billions of years, preserve a pristine ancient snapshot. Water and a high ...

"We're finding this story where together the water, the organic materials and all of these bioessential elements could have been delivered on asteroids like Bennu in the early solar system to ...

McCoy’s team, including 66 researchers across four continents, found the salt and minerals left behind as water on Bennu, or its larger parent asteroid, evaporated. The minerals include sodium ...

NASA scientists found amino acids, key minerals, and nucleobases for DNA in samples from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission.

Related: This is what’s inside NASA’s previously stuck asteroid sampler] The presence of these compounds therefore implies the presence of liquid water at some point in Bennu’s history—or ...

Bennu has long intrigued researchers due to its near-Earth orbit and carbon-rich composition. Scientists theorized that the ...

Some of these types of molecules are the building blocks for life. This combination of rock, water and organics is one reason OSIRIS-REx chose to sample the organic-rich asteroid Bennu, where water ...

Samples of matter returned from the asteroid Bennu support the theory that asteroids could have brought the building blocks of life to Earth, scientists report in a pair of new studies published ...