The building blocks for organic matter have been discovered on the asteroid Bennu, as deatiled in a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research gives new insight into how life originated on Earth and where we might find it elsewhere in the universe.
“Organic matter in meteorites reveals clues about early Solar System chemistry and the origin of molecules important to life,” the authors write, adding that samples from asteroids found on Earth are often contaminated by exposure to our planet. To avoid having this happen with materials acquired from asteroids in space, scientists from Kyushu University in Japan carefully analyzed their samples acquired from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. That mission brought 121.6 grams from the asteroid Bennu to Earth after collecting it in September 2023.
