Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.
The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk.
The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission characterized the asteroid Bennu and delivered pristine samples of its regolith to Earth.
Asteroid Bennu, sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2020, is a mixture of dust that formed in our solar system, organic matter from interstellar space, and pre-solar system stardust. Its […]
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 […]
A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) review of data collected from near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu supports the hypothesis that they were originally part of the Polana collisional family in the […]
![Estimated sampleability efficiency for Nightingale (left) and Osprey (right) [12]. Blue indicates high efficiency while red indicates low efficiency. The tan circle denotes the area that contained 98.3% of Monte Carlo cases while the blue circle contained 80%. -- astro-ph.EP](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/OSIRIS-REx-Operational-Key.png?resize=1200%2C721&ssl=1)
OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, rendezvoused with the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2018 and delivered a 121.6-gram sample to Earth in 2023, the largest amount of material ever […]
The OSIRIS-REx curation team has continued to expand and enrich the NASA OSIRIS-REx catalog – this newsletter includes the second update of the catalog since its initial publication in March […]
As we prepare for the next planetary mission charged with finding life beyond Earth, the Astrobiology community must continue to improve its understanding of what constitutes a biosignature, through the […]
