NASA says asteroid sample contains building blocks of life
Scientists said they didn't find evidence of life on Bennu, but they did find evidence of the building blocks of life.
'Finding the ingredients to life is always very interesting,' said Jason Dworkin, Senior Scientist at NASA.
Dworkin co-authored a paper outlining the chemical compounds scientists found in the Bennu samples. They included 14 of the 20 amino acids life on Earth uses to make proteins and the compounds found in DNA and RNA.
'It's like the alphabet, that goes into words. But we didn't find the words themselves let alone paragraphs,' Dworkin said. 'We found individual letters and all the letters that are used in DNA and RNA.'
Natural History Museum of London researcher Sara Russell also analyzed minerals found in the Bennu samples. They included salts that form when water evaporates.
'All of these ingredients would have impacted the early Earth in the form of Asteroids,' Russell said.
Russell emphasized, those wouldn't have been found on meteorites on Earth.
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