Skip to contentNewsSpaceLifes ingredients have been found in samples from asteroid BennuWarm salty ponds, but no living creatures, also dotted the space rocks precursor body Analyses of dark rocks and dust collected from the asteroid Bennu show the sample has the biochemical building blocks of life, though the environment they formed in probably never proceeded to the life-creation stage. NASA Johnson Space Center / Erika Blumenfeld and Joseph AebersoldBy Adam Mann29 seconds agoUnderground 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.Thats the takeaway from new chemical analyses of samples that NASAs OSIRIS-RExmission 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.