NASA Discovers Water & Carbon In 4.5 Billion Year Old Asteroid Sample

wccftech.com:

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

After its OSIRIS-REx capsule returned to Earth amidst much fanfare late last month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revealed America's first asteroid sample earlier today. The OSIRIS-REx mission had flown to the asteroid Bennu after its launch in 2016, and the sample return culminated the seven-year mission that saw a piece of the asteroid carefully packaged and delivered to Earth.

NASA's initial study of the asteroid rocks reveals that the sample contains some building blocks of life, namely water and carbon. A key part of NASA's investigation is to determine the role that Bennu or other extraterrestrial materials might have played in starting life on Earth, and according to NASA, the OSIRIS-REx samples have the highest abundance of carbon materials out of all extraterrestrial materials analyzed by Carnegie University.

As part of its OSIRIS-REx sample reveal, NASA held a press conference earlier today, which saw the agency's officials and analysts share several details about their discoveries. Not only did NASA receive some 'bonus' material from Bennu in the form of rocks lodged in the canister, but the sample analyzed lends credence to the fact that materials that enabled life to evolve on Earth might have originated from space. While NASA had aimed to collect 60 grams of rocks from Bennu, the agency recovered roughly 250 grams of material, according to preliminary estimates.

One NASA scientist studying the samples is Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx program. Dr. Lauretta explained that the analysis of Bennu rocks with electron