NASA’s Bennu Asteroid Samples Reveal Groundbreaking Discovery from Deep Space

A groundbreaking analysis of samples from the asteroid Bennu—NASA’s first-ever cosmic bounty retrieved from deep space—has unveiled a stunning revelation. Long ago, evaporating water left behind a primordial, briny broth, rich with salts and minerals, creating the perfect crucible for life’s elemental building blocks to mingle and evolve into more complex structures.

This discovery fuels a tantalizing possibility: that extraterrestrial brines, like those once present on Bennu, may have played a pivotal role in forging the organic compounds essential for life itself. The implications stretch far beyond our planet, hinting that the seeds of life could be scattered across the universe, waiting to take root.

In a paper published today, Jan. 29, in the journal Nature, scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History describe a sequence of evaporated minerals that date back to the early formation of the solar system. The assortment of minerals includes compounds that have never been observed in other extraterrestrial samples.

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“We now know from Bennu that the raw ingredients of life were combining in really interesting and complex ways on Bennu’s parent body,” said Tim McCoy, the museum’s curator of meteorites and the co-lead author on the new paper. “We have discovered that next step on a pathway to life.”

Bennu’s parent asteroid, which formed around 4.5 billion years ago, seems to have been home to pockets of liquid water. The new findings indicate that water evaporated and left behind brines that resemble the salty crusts of dry lakebeds on Earth.

Scientists have long been fascinated by Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid with a high carbon content. Their investigations centered on the possibility that Bennu harbors water and organic molecules, leading to the hypothesis that similar asteroids could have delivered these crucial components to the primordial Earth.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission made history by collecting 120 grams of asteroid material from Bennu in 2020, marking the first U.S. asteroid sample return and the first planetary sample since Apollo. The spacecraft released its precious cargo over Utah in September 2023, where scientists recovered the capsule containing about twice the targeted amount of space material—roughly equivalent to a bar of soap. Now, these valuable samples are being studied by researchers worldwide, including Natural History Museum mineralogist Sara Russell, who co-authored the latest findings.

“It’s been an absolute joy to be involved in this amazing mission, and to collaborate with scientists from around the world to attempt to answer one of the biggest questions asked by humanity: how did life begin,” Russell said. “Together we have made huge progress in understanding how asteroids like Bennu evolved, and how they may have helped make the Earth habitable.”