(ORDO NEWS) — According to the alleged analysis of a sample on the surface of an asteroid brought to Earth by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2, the asteroid contains a large number of consumable molecules.
The discovery adds support to the idea that organic material from space has contributed to the list of chemical components needed for life.
Organic molecules are the building blocks of all known terrestrial life and are made up of a wide variety of compounds made up of carbon combined with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and other atoms.
But organic molecules can also be produced from non-life chemical reactions, supporting the hypothesis that chemical reactions in asteroids can create some of the components of life.
The science of prebiotic chemistry is trying to discover the compounds and reactions that occur in various areas of life, and among the prebiotic diseases found in the sample, there were several types of amino acids.
Some amino acids are widely used as building blocks of proteins.
Proteins are essential for life, as they are used to make enzymes that speed up or regulate chemical reactions, and to build microscopic to large structures such as hair and muscles.
The Ryugu sample contains many types of food compounds formed in liquid water, including aliphatic amines, carboxylic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and nitrogen-containing heterocyclic compounds.
“The presence of prebiotic molecules on the surface of the asteroid, despite the harsh environment caused by solar heating and ultraviolet radiation, as well as cosmic ray radiation under high vacuum conditions, suggests that the grains of the upper layer of the Ryugu surface have the potential to protect organic molecules,” said Hiroshi Naraoka from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
“These molecules could be transported throughout the solar system, potentially dispersing as interplanetary dust particles after being ejected from an asteroid’s upper layer by impacts or other causes.”
“At this point, the results of the Ryugu amino acid study are largely consistent with what has been observed in certain types of carbon-rich (carbonaceous) meteorites that have been provided by increased amounts of water in space,” said Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, co-author of the paper. .
“Sugars and nitrogenous bases (components of DNA and RNA) that have been found in some of the carbon-rich meteorites have not yet been identified in samples brought back from Ryugu,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, co-author of the paper.
“It is possible that these compounds are present in asteroid Ryugu, but they are below our limits of analytical detection, given the relatively small mass of the sample available for study.”
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected the samples on February 22, 2019 and delivered them to Earth on December 6, 2020. They were retrieved in Japan in July 2021 and analyzed at Goddard in autumn 2021.
A very small amount of the sample (30 milligrams or about 0.001 oz) was allocated to the international soluble organics analysis team.
The sample was extracted (like tea) in many different solvents in Japan and analyzed in laboratories in Japan, Goddard and Europe using vast amounts of equipment similar to those found in crime labs.
This work was the first organic analysis of a Ryugu specimen, and the specimens will be studied for years.
“We will make a head-to-head comparison between the Ryugu samples and the Bennu sample when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returns it to Earth in 2023,” Dworkin said.
“OSIRIS-REx is expected to return many more mass samples from Bennu and provide another important opportunity to search for traces of organic building blocks of life on a carbon-rich asteroid.”
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.