Underground pools of liquid brine probably formed 4.6 billion years ago on the parent body of the asteroid Bennu and contained the building blocks of life but not living creatures.
That’s the takeaway from new chemical analyses of samples that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission snagged from the roughly 500-meter-long space rock in 2020 and returned to Earth three years later. The findings suggest that not all potentially habitable environments go on to develop life, researchers report in two papers published January 29 in Nature and Nature Astronomy.
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