(ORDO NEWS) — Initial analysis of a sample from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu showed that the asteroid has a rich array of organic molecules.
The Ryugu sample contained many types of organic compounds that form in the presence of 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 its harsh conditions caused by solar heating and ultraviolet radiation, as well as cosmic ray irradiation under high vacuum conditions, suggests that the uppermost surface grains of Ryugu have the potential to protect organic molecules,” Hiroshi said.
Naraoka from Kyushu University. “These molecules could be transported throughout the solar system, potentially dispersing as interplanetary dust particles after being ejected from the uppermost asteroid layer by impacts or other causes.”
“So far, the Ryugu amino acid results are largely consistent with what has been seen in certain types of carbon-rich meteorites that have been exposed to the most water in space,” said Jason Dworkin of NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center, co-author of the study.
“However, the sugars and nucleic bases (components of DNA and RNA) that have been found in some of the carbon-rich meteorites have not yet been identified in samples returned from Ryugu,” said NASA’s Daniel Glavin, co-author of the paper.
“It is possible that these compounds are present in asteroid Ryugu, but are below our limits of analytical detection, given the relatively small mass of the sample available for study.”
The Hayabusa-2 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 the Goddard Center in autumn 2021. A very small amount of the sample (30 milligrams) was allocated to an international soluble organics analysis team.
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