When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate and ammonia. Together, these components could have seeded Earth’s initially barren landscape to produce a habitable world.

The discovery is a capstone achievement for NASA, which went to great lengths to secure and deliver asteroid samples from asteroid Bennu in 2020.

NASA's findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start.