There are 20 amino acids that create the proteins required for life on our planet — and scientists have now found exactly 14 of them on an asteroid millions of miles away. The asteroid in question, ...

OSIRIS-REx had the challenging task of removing samples ... Tim McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C., and lead author of one of the Nature ...

First off, in comparison to meteorites, which enter Earth's atmosphere while enduring a fiery reentry process before plummeting to the ground, the OSIRIS-REx samples are pristine due to the ...

they can react with air and water in ways that can degrade any evidence of organics the meteorite might hold. OSIRIS-REx was designed to keep the samples pure and untouched by Earth, with ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully returned a generous ... A similar asteroid that arrived on Earth as a meteorite would have lost many compounds due to heat and exposure to the atmosphere.

When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate, and ammonia. Together, ...

Meteorites can tell us a lot about the nature ... like those collected by OSIRIS-REx. Content continues below The OSIRIS-REx sample containment pod is shown here, shortly after touching down ...

we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite. Before returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work ...

Scientists have finally had a close look at the rubble collected by a spacecraft from the asteroid Bennu. Here's what they found inside and what it could tell us about the origin of life on Earth.

The OSIRIS-REx mission returned to the sample to Earth in September of 2023, and these studies show that it contains amino acids, nucleobases, and minerals known as evaporites—all elements of life’s ...

So even in the most pristine environment on Earth, meteorites can still be contaminated. And this is where the idea for OSIRIS-REx was born. DANTE LAURETTA: Yeah, it was a really profound moment.