Building blocks of life discovered in dust and soil from asteroid Bennu

Scientists have discovered chemical building blocks of life in rocks and soil samples from asteroid Bennu. Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s history, and Bennu’s samples are pivotal in our understanding of what ingredients in our solar system existed before life started on Earth,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission at Nasa said. One, in the journal Nature Astronomy, found that the samples contained a diverse mixture of organic compounds, and the other, in the journal Nature found that the samples contained minerals formed when brine - salty water - evaporated on Bennu's parent body, the type of wet environment where prebiotic organic chemistry may have brewed. Ammonia is important to biology because it can react with formaldehyde, which also was detected in the samples, to form complex molecules, such as amino acids These building blocks for life detected in the Bennu samples have been found before in extraterrestrial rocks.