Building Blocks of Life Discovered on Distant Asteroid
Clip: Season 52 | 6m 3sVideo has Closed Captions
Scientists have discovered the building blocks of life in samples retrieved from a distant asteroid.
In January 2025, scientists announced the discovery of organic molecules— the building blocks of life— in samples retrieved from a distant asteroid named Bennu. What can this discovery reveal about the secrets of life's origins? Or how common life may be elsewhere in the universe?
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Building Blocks of Life Discovered on Distant Asteroid
Clip: Season 52 | 6m 3sVideo has Closed Captions
In January 2025, scientists announced the discovery of organic molecules— the building blocks of life— in samples retrieved from a distant asteroid named Bennu. What can this discovery reveal about the secrets of life's origins? Or how common life may be elsewhere in the universe?
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- [Narrator] How did life originate on earth?
Science may be getting closer to providing an answer.
In January, 2025, researchers announced the discovery of organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in samples retrieved from a distant asteroid.
- [Marc Buie] It's profoundly exciting.
This is really eyeopening to me.
- [Dante Lauretta] It was a dream come true.
All of those years, decades of planning, implementing, and ultimately, delivering a sample back to the earth have paid off.
- [Narrator] The samples were first retrieved in 2020, during NASA's OSIRIS-REx Mission.
The spacecraft traveled 1.2 billion miles to an asteroid called Bennu, and briefly touched its surface to gather samples of rocks and dust.
(dramatic music) A capsule containing the samples returned to Earth in 2023, safely landing in a Utah desert.
- [Dante] And it was like seeing an old friend that had gone away seven years ago, come back a little bit rough and worse for wear, but carrying this amazing treasure from outer space.
- [Narrator] Analyzing the samples, researchers have discovered thousands of different kinds of organic molecules- molecules that generally contain both carbon and hydrogen- including 14 types of amino acids that cells on Earth use to build proteins, and the four nucleobases found in DNA.
You know, those G's, C's, A, and T's.
Plus, an additional nucleobase we see in RNA.
- [Marc] With the OSIRIS-REx results, we see that we have these building blocks, that's very exciting.
- [Dante] Scientists have been analyzing meteorites, which are fragments of asteroids that land on the surface of the Earth, looking for these compounds for decades now, and we found them.
We have found amino acids in meteorites, hints of nucleobases, the genetic code letters, but the results were always suspect, because we know that as soon as a meteorite lands on earth, it gets contaminated.
So you can never prove it.
You could never prove that these molecules came from outer space, and that is why we had to go and get it straight from the source itself.
- [Narrator] But how could there be organic materials on an asteroid?
Research suggests that Bennu, now only a third of a mile wide, may once have been part of a much larger object, possibly more than a hundred miles wide.
In the frigid reaches of the outer solar system, where Bennu's parent body is suspected to have formed, it would've received very little heat from the sun.
But scientists think that its interior could have remained relatively warm, possibly between 68 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit, thanks in part to an ongoing decay of radioactive elements inside.
We're learning that water is, and has been, very abundant in the solar system.
So deep in the parent asteroid, water ice could have melted into a salty brine.
Over time, allowing compounds like ammonia, formaldehyde, and other molecules to react to form organic molecules like amino acids and nucleobases.
- [Dante] So, by analyzing structures at the minuscule level, the molecular level, we can piece together this grandiose story of a water rich, maybe ocean world forming out beyond Saturn, and over billions of years migrating into inner space, getting shattered, producing the fragments that went into create Bennu.
- [Marc] You can glean so much from the chemistry, how this all relates back to the origin story.
- [Narrator] Scientists believe these findings could help explain how life may have developed in our solar system, as well as give us clues about life's prospects elsewhere.
- [Anjali Tripathi] The prospects for life, I'd say throughout the universe are really exciting and really good, because there are so many places where it looks like you might have all of the right ingredients, and it's just a matter of what it takes to put them together.
- And what we're seeing is the molecules that make up the most fundamental structures in biology, proteins, nucleic acids, genetic code, they're common.
They seem to be everywhere in the early solar system.
And these carbon rich asteroids delivered them not only to the early Earth, but to Venus and to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and beyond.
So we don't know if there's life in any of those locations, although we've got tantalizing clues that there might be, underneath the surface of Mars, in the deep oceans of Europa and Enceladus, these icy satellites of the outer solar system, and at least we know they had a chance.
They got the basic building blocks.
What we don't understand yet, and I think one of the greatest mysteries in science, is how do you take that menagerie of molecules and turn it into something that's alive?
- [Narrators] Researchers will continue to study the Bennu samples, trying to uncover further secrets of life's early remnants.
- [Dante] What's even more exciting is we're really just getting started.
This is the first suite of organic analyses.
We brought back a lot of material and there's a lot more exciting results to come.
- [Marc] I think we need many different kinds of studies to answer the question about what's going on for the origin of the solar system, the origin of life.
I'm sure that there's a role for additional sample return missions.
I think an interesting question would be, which target would you go to for the next one?
- [Anjali] It is really exciting to think about what we'll find, because whether we find that we're alone or that we aren't, right?
It's really profound either way, and I think we always get really hung up on the we must find life, but if we don't find life and we're finding the ingredients for it everywhere, that's also a really interesting question.
- Everything in the solar system connects to the question of life, it's just a question of degree, and that's a very exciting thing.
(dramatic music)
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