Are we all aliens? Returned NASA asteroids hold the ingredients of life from a watery world – Fremont Tribune

The findings provide the strongest evidence that the asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients are mixed with water almost exactly from the beginning.

“This is the species of the environment that could be essential for the steps that lead from elements to life,” said Tim McCoy of the Smithsonian institution, one of the leading authors of the study.

NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned 4 ounces of dust and pebbles from the near-earth asteroid Benno, delivering the sample box in the wilderness in Utah in 2023 before giving up after another space rock. It remains the largest space path beyond the moon. The two previous asteroid sample missions from Japan give significantly less material.

Small quantities of Bennu’s precious black grains – the remnants of the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago – were distributed to the two separate research teams whose studies appear in the magazines nature and nature astronomy. It was more than enough to irritate the minerals rich in sodium and to confirm the presence of amino acids, nitrogen in the form of ammonia and even parts of the genetic code.

Some, if not all, the delicate salts found in Bennu – similar to what is in the dry lake of the lake beds of the California Desert in Mojave and Sahara in Africa – will be undressed if they are present in the falling meteorites.

“This discovery was only possible by analyzing samples, which were collected directly by the asteroid, then carefully preserved back to the ground,” said the studies of the Tokyo Institute of Science, which did not participate in the studies.

Combining the ingredients of life with an environment of sodium -rich salt water or brine, “This is really the way to life,” says McCoy, the national curator of the meteorites of the National Museum of Natural History. “These processes may have happened much earlier and were much wider widespread than we thought before.”

NASA Daniel Glavin said one of the greater surprises was the relatively high abundance of nitrogen, including ammonia. While all the organic molecules found in the Bennu samples were identified before in meteorites, Glavin said that those from Bennu were valid – “a real extraterrestrial organic material formed in space, not the result of contamination from the ground.”

Bennu-bruising ruins only one-third of mile-first was part of a much larger asteroid, which was closed by other space rocks. The latter results suggest that this parent body had an extensive underground network of lakes or even oceans and that the water evaporates, leaving behind the salt clues.

Sixty laboratories around the world have analyzed Bennu’s bits as part of the initial studies, said Dante Laureta of the University of Arizona, the main scientist of the mission, which is involved in both studies.

The bigger part of the $ 1 billion mission cache was canceled for a future analysis. Scientists emphasize more tests to better understand the Bennu samples, as well as more return on the sample of asteroid and comet. China plans to launch a mission to return an asteroid sample this year.

Many demand a mission to collect rocks and dirt from the potentially polluted dwarf Ceres Planet in the main asteroid belt. The moon of Jupiter Europe and the moon of Saturn Enceladus also attracts as tempting aquatic worlds. In the meantime, NASA has major samples in anticipation of a Mars pickup, but their delivery has been detained while the space agency is studying the fastest and cheap way to take them here.

“Are we alone?” said McCoy. “This is one of the questions we are trying to answer.”