New insights from NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission have unveiled intriguing clues about the potential origins of life on Earth. The mission, which launched in Septembe

A NASA spacecraft has returned asteroid samples that hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world.

Scientists studying samples that NASA collected from the asteroid Bennu found a wide assortment of organic molecules that shed light on how life arose.

Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun, mostly found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They can vary in size, from small pebbles to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The newly identified asteroid,

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life were astonishingly widespread in the early solar system

NASA’s Lucy mission will continue its journey to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, in 2025. One key event for Lucy is its flyby of the inner main-belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, scheduled for April 20, 2025.

NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned the samples from Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, in 2023. It's the biggest cosmic haul from beyond the moon.

"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 Dr Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, lead author of one of the studies.

PT5, a near-Earth object discovered last year, has captivated scientists with its potential lunar origins. Likely ejected into space after a massive impact on the Moon thousands of years ago, the asteroid’s orbit closely matches Earth’s.

In October 2020, a van-sized robotic spacecraft briefly touched down on the surface of Bennu, a 525-metre-wide asteroid 320 million kilometres from

Scientists found that asteroid Bennu contained a set of salty mineral deposits that formed in an exact sequence when a brine evaporated, leaving clues about the type of water that flowed billions of years ago.