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The nation's first-ever asteroid samples were shown off at NASA's Johnson Space Center on Wednesday.

NASA scientists discover captured water and carbon-rich materials, the building blocks of life, in early analysis of Bennu asteroid sample from the Osirus-Rex mission.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has collected samples from Bennu -- a 4.5 billion-year-old "near-Earth" asteroid that has a slight chance of a planetary collision 159 years from now -- and they could show, as the agency described it, "the building blocks of life on Earth."

This fall, NASA is all about asteroids. OSIRIS-REx's brought samples from Bennu; Psyche will visit a space rock; and the Lucy spacecraft will fly by an asteroid.

This fall, NASA marks milestones in three different missions that explore unanswered questions about the process that made Earth, the stuff that makes the solar system and how we might save ourselves should a much larger space rock come hurtling our way.