Scientists have detected organic compounds and minerals necessary for life in the samples collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu.

The building blocks for life, including salts, organic matter and amino acids have been found in samples returned to Earth from outer space.

Bennu contains minerals and thousands of organic molecules, including the chemical components that make up DNA.

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.

Rock and dust samples retrieved by NASA from the asteroid Bennu exhibit some of the chemical building blocks of life, according to research that provides some of the best evidence to date that such space rocks may have seeded early Earth with the raw ingredients that fostered the emergence of living organisms.

Some amino acids can be built in two ways that mirror each other, like a pair of right and left hands. Life on Earth uses the left-handed variety of these amino acids. Scientists have previously found left-handed amino acids in similar meteorites that have fallen to Earth and so presumed that the Bennu sample would show the same.

Rock and dust samples from the Bennu asteroid contain molecules that are the "key to life" on Earth, NASA officials announced on Wednesday.

In samples NASA brought back from the asteroid Bennu, scientists have discovered of organic compounds, including key building blocks of life like amino acids.