Nature had the conditions to "cook up" the chemical precursor ingredients for life before Earth formed, according to two studies published by the sample analysis team of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which is led by Dante Lauretta at the University of Arizona.

In this video, Dr. Erika Hamden, professor of astrophysics at the U of A, talks with KALFAA science director Professor Tom Zega to learn about KALFAA's role in analyzing the Bennu sample.

Before this milestone, the curation team already had collected more than the 60 grams required to declare the mission a success.

At the university's Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory for Astromaterials Analysis, a suite of instruments allows researchers to study the particles collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission the down to the atomic scale.

Zoë Wilbur is a fifth-year planetary sciences graduate student who studies cosmochemistry.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission learned much about the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu and its risk to Earth. Now, the mission will change hands and target a different kind of potentially hazardous asteroid, Apophis.

The center will bring together students and faculty from across campus and disciplines to unravel the enigma of life's beginnings and our place in the cosmos.

NASA's University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission has returned a sample that scientists will study for decades to learn more about the formation of the solar system.

The delivery from the asteroid Bennu, seven years after the spacecraft launched, marks the end of the space-voyaging phase of the mission. Scientists will now study the rocks and dust to better understand the origins of life on Earth.

After dropping off its historic sample from asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is headed to its next target: another potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid, called Apophis.