The museum team was especially surprised to find traces of water-bearing sodium carbonate compounds, commonly known as soda ash, in the Bennu sample. These chemicals have never been found in ...

Smithsonian and NASA scientists set out to collect an asteroid sample that may hold clues to the origins of life in our solar ...

Scientists from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission recently delivered remarkable findings about asteroid 101955 Bennu after the mission returned its samples to Earth in 2023.

A NASA mission collected the sample and brought ... Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and co-lead author of a new paper in the journal "Nature," about the Bennu samples.

The sample, which the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected from the asteroid Bennu and returned to Earth ... curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said in ...

Scanning electron microscope images of trona found in samples of the asteroid Bennu returned by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Trona is water-bearing sodium carbonate, also known commonly as soda ash.

Natural History Museum/Tobias Salge Scanning electron microscopes revealed the minerals in the Bennu sample The new research has shown that the space rock is packed full of nitrogen and carbon ...

Bennu is a fragment ... London's Natural History Museum. Senior NASA scientist Jason Dworkin said, "We found no strong chemical evidence of cellular materials. We can’t prove a negative. We would have ...

Ammonia, which is important for biochemical reactions, was discovered in the sample ... asteroids like Bennu flying about," explained Dr Ashley King, from the Natural History Museum.