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

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The origins of life on our planet remains one of science’s great mysteries. Now, a NASA mission that brought a piece of an ...

There are 20 amino acids that create the proteins required for life on our planet — and scientists have now found exactly 14 of them on an asteroid millions of miles away. The asteroid in question, ...

"Depending on the collision parameters, an impact between a medium-sized asteroid and Earth could cause regional to large-scale devastation," wrote Timmermann and his colleague Lan Dai in their study.

All forms of Earth life have specific chemicals in their makeup, such as amino acids and sugars. Scientists have known that ...

The asteroid in question, named Bennu, was the focus of a very dreamy NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx that launched in 2016. The first goal of OSIRIS-REx was to blast a spacecraft toward the ...

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 ...

OSIRIS-REx was launched in 2016 and briefly touched down on Bennu on Oct. 20, 2020, to collect samples from the near-Earth asteroid. After a journey of more than 4 billion miles, the van-sized ...

The OSIRIS-REx mission returned to the sample to Earth in September of 2023, and these studies show that it contains amino acids, nucleobases, and minerals known as evaporites—all elements of life’s ...

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