Building blocks of life found in samples from asteroid Bennu

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 space rocks may have seeded early earth with the raw ingredients that fostered the emergence of living organisms. The U.S. space agency’s robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020 collected the samples from the near-earth asteroid, a rocky remnant of a larger celestial body that had formed near the dawn of the solar system roughly 4.5 billion years ago. “The detection of these key building blocks of life in the Bennu samples supports the theory that asteroids and their fragments seeded the early earth with the raw ingredients that led to the emergence of life,” said astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, lead author of one of the studies. “The suite of simple protein amino acids and nucleobases that were found in Bennu are a long way from anything that could be considered ‘living,’ for example, a more complex self-sustaining chemical system that can replicate and evolve which is comprised of much larger polymers - proteins and nucleic acids - that are found in cells,” Glavin said.