Scientists studying samples from the Bennu asteroid located not too far from Earth continue to find clues as to how life began in our solar system.

The nitrogen in the gum was found to be in nitrogen heterocycles, which are the building blocks of nucleobases in DNA and RNA ...

Several sugars have been found on a sample of the asteroid Bennu, which may provide scientists with clues about our early ...

Asteroid Bennu was expected to be relatively smooth and easy to sample. When OSIRIS-REx arrived, it found a surface covered ...

When NASA scientists opened the sample return canister from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample mission in late 2023, they found ...

Bennu is believed to have originated from the shards of a much larger world. Curiously, asteroid Ryugu, sampled by the Japanese probe Hayabusa2, might have also come from the same world. This ...

With the return of an Asteroid Bennu sample in 2023 as part of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, researchers from the University of Arizona have made significant discoveries toward understanding the origins ...

Asteroid Bennu, a dark rubble pile that crosses Earth’s orbit every few years, is turning out to be a kind of cosmic pantry ...

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. When the spacecraft completed its long journey home more than ...

China’s Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return mission is set to launch this month, May 2025, en route to the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3). The country could join the United States and Japan, whose space ...

The Bennu asteroid, a space rock not too far from Earth that is rich in carbon, continues to be a trove of information for scientists keen to learn about how life may have begun in our solar system.