NASA is getting ready to land on an asteroid that may hold the building blocks of life
Carbon bearing organic material on the asteroid. Well some say life on earth was seeded via asteroid strikes.
Read the rest of the article at the link.With NASA getting ready to land a spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu in just a few short days, the mysterious space rock is already revealing some of its secrets, including the presence of carbon-bearing materials.
Several studies were published on the matter in the journals Science and Science Advances, noting that carbon-bearing, organic material is "widespread" on the surface of the asteroid. This includes the area where NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will take its first sample from, known as Nightingale, on Oct. 20.
The abundance of carbon-bearing material is a major scientific triumph for the mission. We are now optimistic that we will collect and return a sample with organic material a central goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission, said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement.