What did this California lakebed
and this rock on an asteroid
have in common?
Although they're located
on radically different worlds,
they both contain minerals
that formed in environments
that may have assembled
the building blocks of life.
For over a year, scientists
have been studying the material gathered
by the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission
from the asteroid Bennu,
and one of the many things they found
are tiny crystals
of a mineral called trona.
Trona is a mineral known as an evaporite,
meaning it is deposited
when a briny lake evaporates,
leaving behind all kinds of salts.
Just like in the salt beds of
Searles Lake, California.
Finding trona and other evaporites
tell scientists
that the Bennu samples
once held pockets of salty
room-temperature water.
And that is just the kind of environment
perfect for forming organic molecules,
the building blocks of life.
Scientists found organic molecules
in the Bennu samples,
including compounds
that are important to building life.
These findings and others
gathered from the asteroid samples
suggest that Bennu is a fragment of a
once wet world,
likely including material
from beyond Saturn's orbit
that existed about 4.5 billion years ago.
Finding these ingredients
supports the theory
that asteroids like Bennu
dispersed water and the
chemical building blocks of life
throughout our solar system
and beyond.