NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to return samples of Asteroid Bennu to Earth. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA's OSIRIS-REx ...

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 ...

Analyzing a precious bit of space dust no bigger than a teaspoon, the Penn State team used custom instruments capable of measuring isotopes, slight variations in the mass of atoms. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa ...

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission brought back samples from asteroid 101955 Bennu, researchers found that they contained amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life. Amino acids are the molecules ...