Bennu Sample

Bennu Sample: Scientists have recently revealed that these rocks contain key components of life - Amino acids, nucleobases and traces of ancient saltwater — the essential ingredients for biological processes.

  • About OSIRIS-REx Mission Key Findings: Uncovered pristine organic molecules, offering insights into how life’s chemistry may have formed in the solar system.

o Bennu, a relic from the dawn of the solar system, contained organic molecules and minerals that may have shaped life’s chemistry.

o The mission successfully returned samples from Bennu to Earth in 2023.

  • Cosmic Time Capsule: Bennu samples contain the highest concentration of extraterrestrial life-supporting compounds ever brought to Earth.
  • Asteroids like Bennu provide snapshots of solar system conditions from 4.5 billion years ago.

o These samples help to understand the ingredients that existed before life started on Earth.

  • Key Organic Discoveries: The samples contain 14 of the 20 amino acids needed to build proteins

o They also have all five nucleobases required for DNA and RNA.

  • Unusual finding: Life on Earth mostly uses left-handed amino acids, but Bennu has equal amounts of left- and right-handed ones.
  • Presence of ammonia and formaldehyde, which can form more complex molecules, supports asteroids as potential incubators of prebiotic chemistry.
  • Water: The Crucial Ingredient:

o Bennu’s samples contain traces of water in the form of mineral salts.

o Scientists detected 11 different evaporite minerals, including calcite, halite, sylvite, and trona (first identified in an extraterrestrial sample).

o These minerals suggest Bennu once had briny water that evaporated over thousands or millions of years.

o Similar salty water exists on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Ceres.

o This strengthens the theory that watery environments were widespread in the early solar system, facilitating chemical reactions leading to life.