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"We think objects like Bennu may have made Earth habitable," Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx's principal investigator and a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona, told The Wall Street Journal.

“This is a game changer for cosmochemistry.”

Ms. Valdes specializes in cosmochemistry, which examines the composition of meteorites to glean insights about the origin and nature of other celestial bodies.

But the researchers’ interpretation of their chemical analysis troubles Sylvain Bernard, a geochemist at the Institute of Mineralogy, Physics of Materials and Cosmochemistry in Paris.

“It’s a time capsule from the earliest stages of solar system formation,” said Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona who is the mission’s principal investigator.