Samples collected on carbonaceous asteroids and preserved from terrestrial alteration are key witnesses of the early evolution of the Solar System. Here we present the results of the characterization, by […]
While it has been long supposed that asteroids played a role in the delivery of important prebiotic compounds to early Earth, the exact nature of the interactions between asteroidal material […]
The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk.
The Workshop on Bennu and Ryugu: Samples from the Early Solar System is scheduled for October 7–9, 2025, at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas.
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 […]
Lactic acid (CH3CH(OH)COOH)–a key biorelevant hydroxycarboxylic acid–is ubiquitous in living organisms and critically linked to the molecular origins of life due to its fundamental role in metabolic pathways.
The molecular framework for protometabolism-chemical reactions in a prebiotic environment preceding modern metabolism-has remained unknown in evolutionary biology.
The pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 mission on December 6, 2020, have been vital to improving our understanding of primitive asteroids and the formation of the […]
