This mineral-rich asteroid might have carried the seeds of life. Planetary scientists have discovered organic matter essential to life in dust and rock retrieved from an asteroid known as Bennu. The finding supports the theory that near-Earth asteroids,

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

Scientists studying samples that NASA collected from the asteroid Bennu found a wide assortment of organic molecules that shed light on how life arose.

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.