Asteroid Bennu Holds the Building Blocks of Life

What can a space rock tell us about life on Earth? NASA ‘s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a careful approach to the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu in October of 2020 to collect surface samples. In September 2023, the robotic spaceship returned these samples to Earth. A recent analysis has shown, surprisingly, that the samples contained 14 out of the 20 known amino acid s that are the essential building blocks of life. The presence of the amino acids re-introduces a big question: Could life have originated in space? However, the protein building blocks themselves held another surprise — they contained an even mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids — in contrast to our Earth which only has left-handed ones. This raises another big question: Why does life on Earth have only left-handed amino acids? Research on this is sure to continue.