WASHINGTON—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 samples were delivered to Earth in 2023 by parachute inside a capsule released by OSIRIS-REx that landed in the Utah desert....
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