Researchers say the asteroid Bennu has the building blocks for life on it. The samples collected and returned to Earth were part of the University of Arizona-led OSIRS-REx mission.

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life were astonishingly widespread in the early solar system

Bennu samples brought back by a University of Arizona-led space mission contain the key ingredients of life and signs of the stew needed to mix them.

The building blocks for life, including salts, organic matter and amino acids have been found in samples returned to Earth from outer space.

In October 2020, a van-sized robotic spacecraft briefly touched down on the surface of Bennu, a 525-metre-wide asteroid 320 million kilometres from Earth.

It took a while for scientists to gain access to the samples that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took from the asteroid Bennu, but the wait is proving to be worth it. A new study published January 29 in Nature describes an unexpected discovery in the material delivered by OSIRIS-REx: residues of compounds left over by the evaporation of liquid water.

Scientists studying samples that NASA collected from the asteroid Bennu found a wide assortment of organic molecules that shed light on how life arose.

With the OSIRIS-REx space probe, the NASA space agency succeeded in collecting some material from the surface of asteroid Bennu, which arrived on Earth in a small capsule in 2023. The analysis of the material by more than 40 scientific teams worldwide – including the team led by Prof.