The asteroid Ryugu is seen by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft from a distance of 6 kilometers. Credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, ...

JAXA samples reveal that asteroid Ryugu has a complete set of nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The asteroid Ryugu, a ...

Scientists have calculated what would happen if the asteroid Ryugu struck our planet. Predicting the result of such a collision was made possible thanks to the analysis of samples returned to Earth by ...

Samples taken from the space-returned piece of asteroid Ryugu were collected and prepared under strict anti-contamination controls. Inside the cleanest of clean rooms, a tiny particle was collected ...

Scientists detected all five nucleobases in asteroid Ryugu samples, suggesting the key building blocks of DNA and RNA are ...

In 2018, the Japanese space agency’s Hayabusa2 probe visited the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, which occasionally traverses our world’s orbit (but has yet to come dangerously close). It extracted a tiny ...

The asteroid Ryugu may look like a solid piece of rock, but it’s more accurate to liken it to an orbiting pile of rubble. Given the relative fragility of this collection of loosely bound boulders, ...

How did life come about? The answer to this question goes to the very heart of our existence on planet Earth. Did life simply arise from chemical reactions among organic compounds in a primordial soup ...

Uracil, a building block of life, has been found on the asteroid Ryugu. Yasuhiro Oba and colleagues discovered the precursor to life in samples collected from the asteroid and returned to Earth by ...

The Hayabusa2 mission that collected samples from the asteroid Ryugu has provided a treasure trove of insights into our solar system. After analyzing samples further, a team of researchers have ...