NASA scientists found amino acids, key minerals, and nucleobases for DNA in samples from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission. It's a win for alien life.

All forms of Earth life have specific chemicals in their makeup, such as amino acids and sugars. Scientists have known that asteroids hold molecules believed to be the precursors to these chemicals. By studying the Bennu samples, they hope to gain more insight into how these ingredients could have evolved.

Analysis of debris from the nearly 5 billion-year-old asteroid Bennu suggests the building blocks of DNA and RNA were present in the early days of our solar system.

Samples of asteroid Bennu contain molecules that suggest the "conditions necessary for life" were widespread across the early solar system, according to NASA.

Scientists have found all five nucelobases alongisde minerals essential for life as we know it on the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu.

Asteroid Bennu seems to have come from a long-lost world on the fringes of the solar system, where saltwater pooled and dried over thousands of years and life’s basic ingredients were widespread.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned triumphantly to Earth in 2023 after collecting 4.3 ounces (121.6 grams) of precious grains of dust and rock from the asteroid Bennu in 2020. While that sample return was an incredible feat of engineering,

Rock and dust samples retrieved by NASA from the asteroid Bennu exhibit some of the chemical building blocks of life, according to research that provides some of the best evidence to date that such space rocks may have seeded early Earth with the raw ingredients that fostered the emergence of living organisms.

The latest discovery, unveiled by the NASA on January 29, came as a bit of a surprise and posed many exciting questions such as “Why didn’t life form on Bennu?”

The meteor fragments returned by OSIRIS-REx shed light on the entwined history of water and the chemical ingredients of life in the solar system.

When exposed to formaldehyde, which was also detected, ammonia can form amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. According to the study in Nature Astronom y, the team also found 14 of the 20 amino acids present in Earth-bound life in the Bennu sample. In addition, Bennu contains all five of the nucleotide bases present in DNA and RNA.