There’s certainly nothing living on the asteroid Bennu, an airless, 1,614-ft. rubble pile orbiting the sun about 40.2 million miles from Earth. But that doesn’t mean that Bennu hasn’t all at once ...

A close-up of the surface of asteroid Ryugu. (MASCOT/DLR/JAXA) A new analysis of samples collected from asteroid Ryugu has yielded all five canonical nucleobases that make up RNA and DNA. It's not the ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Penn State scientists say Bennu’s glycine may have formed in frozen, irradiated ice, not warm ...

Bennu is not the first asteroid to deliver a sample to Earth, but it is quickly becoming one of the most chemically revealing. Earlier missions returned smaller amounts of material that already hinted ...

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned samples from the asteroid Bennu in 2020, has provided groundbreaking insights into the complex origins and dramatic transformation of the asteroid. The ...

With the return of an Asteroid Bennu sample in 2023 as part of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, researchers from the University of Arizona have made significant discoveries toward understanding the origins ...

Asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, led by the University of Arizona—is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few ...

Penn State researchers think a key ingredient for life may have formed in deep freeze, not in a warm asteroid puddle. Scientists at Penn State; led by geoscientist Allison Baczynski and postdoctoral ...