An asteroid carrying some of the basic building blocks of life has been reported in the journal Nature Astronomy. This finding opens the possibility that life on Earth could have been seeded by chemicals in the cosmos billions of years ago.
“Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s history, and Bennu’s samples are pivotal in our understanding of what ingredients in our solar system existed before life started on Earth,” Nicky Fox, a NASA official, said in a news release. “NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission already is rewriting the textbook on what we understand about the beginnings of our solar system.”
Although meteorites, from which asteroids break off from, have been theorized as potential vehicles for life-seeding chemical passengers, analyzing them for its signs has been tricky. Because meteorites pass through the atmosphere, they could pick up moisture, which could then contaminate any sample.
To circumvent that issue, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx ...
