Molecules friendly to life have been found in samples of the asteroid Bennu, which NASA collected with a robotic probe five years ago.

Rock and dust samples from the Bennu asteroid contain molecules that are the "key to life" on Earth, NASA officials announced on Wednesday.

Astro Brief is a collaboration between KSMU, the Missouri Space Grant, and MSU's Department of Physics, Astronomy and ...

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

NASA OSIRIS-REx sample collection event at Asteroid Bennu saw the spacecraft plunge its arm into the surface. Find out how ...

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

Bennu is a medium-sized asteroid. According to NASA, Bennu is about one-third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide at its equator. That's far smaller than the six-mile (10-kilometer) wide behemoth ...

NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned 122 grams (4 ounces) of dust and pebbles from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, delivering the sample canister to the Utah desert in 2023 before swooping off ...

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 ...

Studies on asteroid Bennu's chemical building blocks deepens the mystery. Credit: Christoph Burgstedt / iStock / Getty Images illustration When NASA launched a spacecraft to an asteroid ...

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, ...