NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully returned a generous chunk of the asteroid Bennu to Earth in 2023, and scientists have been analyzing it ever since. International scientific teams have published a pair of studies this week highlighting the incredible assortment of materials found in the sample.

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life were astonishingly widespread in the early solar system

With the OSIRIS-REx space probe, the NASA space agency succeeded in collecting some material from the surface of asteroid Bennu, which arrived on Earth in a small capsule in 2023. The analysis of the material by more than 40 scientific teams worldwide – including the team led by Prof.

Researchers say the asteroid Bennu has the building blocks for life on it. The samples collected and returned to Earth were part of the University of Arizona-led OSIRS-REx mission.

There’s certainly nothing living on the asteroid Bennu, an airless, 1,614-ft. rubble pile orbiting the sun about 40.2 million miles from Earth. But that doesn’t mean that Bennu hasn’t all at once become one of the most biologically interesting objects in the solar system.

Scientists reported this week that asteroid samples taken from a distant asteroid known as Bennu were found to contain key organic molecules necessary to sustain life. CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood has more.