OSIRIS-REx mission tagged posts

Nitrogen is a key ingredient in the biomolecules that form the building blocks of life. Yet as an unbonded gas, it is far more likely to drift into space than to lock itself into solid compounds, making it difficult for astronomers to trace its journey to Earth in the distant past.

Through new research published in Nature Astronomy, a team led by Toru Matsumoto at Kyoto University has found some of the best evidence yet of how this journey happened, hidden inside grains of dust from the asteroid Ryugu.

Evidence across the solar system
Nitrogen-bearing compounds, particularly ammonia, have already been spotted on the dwarf planet Ceres and on several carbon-rich asteroids, hinting ...

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. How those amino acids—the molecules that create proteins and peptides in DNA—formed in space was a mystery, but new research led by Penn State scientists shows they could have originated in an icy-cold, radioactive environment at the dawn of Earth’s solar system.

According to the researchers, who published new findings in the Proceedings of th...

Researchers have analyzed samples of the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil, one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples.

This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have b...

Shortly after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu, an unexpected discovery by the mission’s science team revealed that the asteroid could be active, or consistently discharging particles into space...