Bench Talk | Could Asteroids Have Seeded Life on Earth? | March 24, 2025

In 2020, a NASA space probe (called OSIRIS-REx) gently touched down on the asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles away, and collected rocks and gravel. It delivered that sample to NASA scientists on Earth in 2023. On January 29, 2025 two research papers were published describing their analysis of this asteroid material. It appears to contain some of the chemicals found on meteorites that have hit the earth in the past, but there were some surprises, too. Like the presence of salt crystals that indicate there was water on the asteroid sometime in its past. Basic chemical building-blocks of life were also discovered on Bennu, so we discuss the implications of this on theories about how life first evolved here Earth. Here are links to the two papers: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08495-6 and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02472-9. ‘Bench Talk: The Week in Science’ is a weekly program that airs on WFMP Louisville FORward Radio 106.5 FM (forwardradio.org) every Monday at 7:30 pm, Tuesday at 11:30 am, and Wednesday at 7:30 am. Visit our Facebook page for link to the articles discussed in this episode: https://www.facebook.com/pg/BenchTalkRadio/posts/?ref=page_internal. Music heard on this episode is the public-domain version of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra – Fanfare' by Richard Strauss (1896).