Story by Science X staff ... the break-up of Bennu's parent body interrupted all processes very early on and the traces that have now been discovered were preserved for more than 4.5 billion years.

6 days ago · Bennu is a potentially hazardous asteroid that has a 1-in-2,700 chance of striking Earth in the year 2182 — the highest odds of any known space object. But scientists are more interested in what ...

Story by Science X staff • 11h. A steroids, small airless bodies within the inner solar system, are theorized to have contributed water and chemical building blocks of life to Earth billions of ...

6 days ago · Ranging from calcite to halite and sylvite, scientists identified traces of 11 minerals in the Bennu sample that form as water containing dissolved salts evaporates over long periods of time, leaving behind the salts as solid crystals.

4 days ago · The Bennu samples provide our first direct look at how such extraterrestrial brines evolve and what kinds of chemical environments they create. ... About StudyFinds Staff. StudyFinds sets out to find new research that speaks to mass audiences — without all the scientific jargon. The stories we publish are digestible, summarized versions of ...

3 days ago · Ammonia is crucial for life. Scientists found incredibly large amounts of ammonia in the Bennu samples. Ammonia is important for life because it can combine with formaldehyde, which was also found in the samples, to create complex molecules like amino acids when the conditions are right.. When amino acids join together into long chains, they form proteins, which are essential for almost every ...

6 days ago · Researchers from NASA Ames Research Center and the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory worked with staff at the ALS to study the Bennu sample using scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM). By varying the energy of the X-rays, they were able to determine the presence (or absence) of specific chemical bonds at the nanometer scale and map ...

5 days ago · Staff Contributor. January 29, 2025. A scanning electron microscope image shows sodium carbonates in a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Each needle is less than one micrometer wide by five to ten ...

6 days ago · By NASA and Daniel Stolte/University Communications - January 29, 2025. Nature had the conditions to "cook up" the chemical precursor ingredients for life before Earth formed, according to two studies published by the sample analysis team of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which is led by Dante Lauretta at the University of Arizona.. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned a sample from asteroid Bennu ...

The rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu hold amino acids, ammonia and other molecules essential to life on Earth, NASA reported Wednesday. ... Story by Andrea Leinfelder, Staff writer • 6m.