Two new papers describe hints to a brine-filled environment on the 4.5-billion-year-old space rock and the presence of amino acids, offering clues to how early Earth got its ingredients for life

It took a while for scientists to gain access to the samples that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took from the asteroid Bennu, but the wait is proving to be worth it. A new study published January 29 in Nature describes an unexpected discovery in the material delivered by OSIRIS-REx: residues of compounds left over by the evaporation of liquid water.

Scientists from NASA and other institutions who have been analyzing the Bennu asteroid sample that returned to Earth last September found molecules, including amino acids, which are essential ingredients of life as we know it.