NASA probed an asteroid and found an ancient ... and the five nucleobases for DNA and RNA. As asteroids crash into worlds across the galaxy, "they're essentially seeding these planets with the ...

All forms of Earth life have specific chemicals in their makeup, such as amino acids and sugars. Scientists have known that ...

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.

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, ...

According to NASA, Bennu is about one-third of a mile ... Earth uses to store and transmit genetic instructions in DNA and RNA. “Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s ...

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 ...

NASA researchers immediately stored the pristine ... To make a protein, our cells copy a gene from DNA to a similar molecule called RNA, which uses three of DNA’s nucleobases plus one of its ...

Rock and dust samples from the Bennu asteroid contain molecules that are the "key to life" on Earth, NASA officials announced on Wednesday.

Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers ...