Some if not all of the delicate salts found at Bennu — similar to what’s in the dry lakebeds of California’s Mojave Desert and Africa’s Sahara — would be stripped away if present in ...

In 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached asteroid 101955 Bennu. Two years later, the spacecraft snagged a sample of its surface, which has since been returned to Earth. Now, astronomers are ...

Samples from Bennu contained all five of the "letters" that make up life's genetic codes — DNA and RNA — alongside minerals rich in carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, fluorine and sodium — the ...