Earthlife is made of space stuff, studies of asteroid Bennu hint

4 JANUARY 2026

In 2020, a spacecraft more than 3 lakh km away on a small asteroid called Bennu collected samples of its surface.
The craft, part of NASA’s OSIRIS REx mission, then launched itself towards the earth, dropping off the canister of samples in September 2023.
Since then, scientists in the US and Japan have been studying pieces of Bennu to answer fundamental questions about the formation of the early solar system and life on the earth.
On December 2, 2025 three teams published papers reporting Bennu contains sugar and other important molecules required to form RNA, and is also surprisingly abundant in supernova dust from a time before the sun formed.
The findings strengthen the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis: that early life used RNA as a source of genetic information and for catalytic functions, before DNA and proteins evolved.
According to the study, the abundance of asteroids like Bennu in the inner solar system would have provided sugars and amino acids, leading to the formation of life on the earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.