Retired astronaut and current Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) celebrated NASA’s “pretty exciting” announcement on Thursday after the space agency highlighted how scientists found sugars essential for life on samples of a near-Earth asteroid.

While the discovery of the sugars glucose and ribose — which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft gathered from the asteroid Bennu — did not indicate “evidence of life,” the findings show that “building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system,” according to NASA.

The space agency noted that the sugars deoxyribose — which wasn’t found in the samples — and ribose are key building blocks of DNA and RNA on Earth.

Yoshihiro Furukawa, a professor at Japan’s Tohoku University who led the team of researchers that made the findings, said that the discovery of ribose means “all of the components” that form RNA are present in the asteroid.

Kelly, in a clip shared on social media, said the findings spark “larger questions about life in the universe” and underscore the importance of federal funding for scientific research.

“We don’t know for sure if there’s life anywhere else, but when you think of the probability, the statistical probability that it exists, maybe there’s life out there,” said Kelly, who recently joked on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show that the U.S. found aliens, but it became a problem when they asked to go to our leader.

NASA revealed they found some of the building blocks of life in a sample brought back from an asteroid (on a @UArizona-led mission, by the way).

It raises some big questions about whether there’s other life somewhere out there in the universe. According to my math, probably. pic.twitter.com/ZzSPHTuh7t

— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) December 5, 2025

Danny Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and co-investigator on the OSIRIS-REx mission, said in a video that the discovery makes him “much more optimistic” about the search for extraterrestrial life.

“What this means is that these building blocks of life were distributed from the outer solar system all the way into the inner solar system,” Glavin explained.

“They were everywhere, ubiquitous, which really makes me more optimistic that not only could these building blocks have enabled life on Earth, but potentially elsewhere — Mars, Europa, the outer solar system.”