Gravity Assist: A Special Delivery of Life’s Building Blocks, with Jason Dworkin

When Earth was just a baby, meteors and asteroids rained down, delivering all sorts of chemicals to our developing planet. These small objects could have delivered the chemicals needed to spark life on Earth for the first time. The OSIRIS-REx mission will collect and return a sample from asteroid Bennu, a 4.5-billion-year-old fossil of the early solar system. By looking at pieces of Bennu in laboratories, scientists will be able to look at its composition and see whether some of the building blocks of life came from objects like Bennu.