The Building Blocks for Life Found in Asteroid Bennu Samples

Artist concept of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it readies itself to touch the surface of asteroid Bennu. This mission is an early precursor to possible asteroid mining. Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
Artist concept of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it readies itself to touch the surface of asteroid Bennu. This mission is an early precursor to possible asteroid mining. Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

The study of asteroid samples is a highly lucrative area of research and one of the best ways to determine how the Solar System came to be. Given that asteroids are leftover material from the formation of the Solar System, they are likely to contain vital clues about how several key processes took place. This includes how water, organic molecules, and the building blocks of life were distributed throughout the Solar System billions of years ago. For this reason, space agencies have attached a high importance to the retrieval of asteroid samples that are returned to Earth for analysis.

This includes NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission. This spacecraft rendezvoused with asteroid (101955) Bennu on December 3rd, 2018, returning 121.6 grams of material (the largest sample ever) to Earth by September 2023. A recent analysis by scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center revealed molecules key to life on Earth, including all five nitrogen bases – molecules required for building DNA and RNA. These findings support the theory that asteroids could have delivered the building blocks of life to Earth in the distant past.

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Lessons From Ancient Earth’s Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable

Earth's ancient atmosphere was much different than now. How did it transition from hostile to hospitable? If scientists can figure that out, they'll be better able to understand exoplanets and their atmospheres. Image Credit: Tohoku University

Will we ever understand how life got started on Earth? We’ve learned much about Earth’s long, multi-billion-year history, but a detailed understanding of how the planet’s atmospheric chemistry evolved still eludes us. At one time, Earth was atmospherically hostile, and its transition from that state to a planet teeming with life followed a complex path.

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Linking Organic Molecules to Hydrothermal Vents on Enceladus

Saturn's moon Enceladus isn't just bright and beautiful. It has an ocean under all that ice that could have hydrothermal vents that create organic chemicals. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, SSI, Cassini Imaging Team

Despite the vast distance between us and Saturn’s gleaming moon Enceladus, the icy ocean moon is a prime target in our search for life. It vents water vapour and large organic molecules into space through fissures in its icy shell, which is relatively thin compared to other icy ocean moons like Jupiter’s Europa. Though still out of reach, scientific access to its ocean is not as challenging as on Europa, which has a much thicker ice shell.

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Cosmic Dust Could Spread Life from World to World Across the Galaxy

Could life spread throughout the galaxy on tiny grains of dust? It would be a perilous journey, but new research shows its possible and calculates how long it would take to spread. Image Credit: ESO

Does life appear independently on different planets in the galaxy? Or does it spread from world to world? Or does it do both?

New research shows how life could spread via a basic, simple pathway: cosmic dust.

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Finally, Let’s Look at the Asteroid Treasure Returned to Earth by OSIRIS-REx

A top-down view of the OSIRIS-REx Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism (TAGSAM) head with the lid removed, revealing the remainder of the asteroid sample inside. Photo: NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx delivered its precious cargo to Earth on September 24th, 2023. The sample from asteroid Bennu is contained inside the spacecraft’s sampling head, and it’s in safe hands at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Two stubborn fasteners delayed the opening of the sampling head, but they’ve been removed, and now we can see inside.

What looks like unremarkable dirt is primordial asteroidal material that’s billions of years old, a natural treasure trove that eager scientists can’t wait to begin studying.

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Toxic Gas is Leaking out of Enceladus. It’s also a Building Block of Life.

The Cassini spacecraft captured this image of cryovolcanic plumes erupting from Enceladus' ice-capped ocean. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/CalTech

Enceladus’ status as a target in the search for life keeps rising. We’ve known for years that plumes erupting from the ocean under the moon’s icy shell contain important organic compounds related to life. Now, researchers have found another chemical in the plumes which is not only highly toxic but also critical in the appearance of life.

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A Hypervelocity Experiment Mimics the Surface Conditions of Ceres

Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, taken by Dawn Framing Camera
Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA's Dawn mission found complex organic molecules on Ceres. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, taken by Dawn Framing Camera

It might be oxymoronic to say that the more we find out about something, the more mysterious it becomes. But if that’s true of anything in our Solar System, it might be true about Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt.

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JWST Sees Organic Molecules Ludicrously Far Away

Astronomers using the Webb telescope discovered evidence of complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away. In this false-color Webb image, the foreground galaxy is shown in blue, while the background galaxy is red. The organic molecules are highlighted in orange. Graphic courtesy J. Spilker / S. Doyle, NASA, ESA, CSA

When astronomers used the JWST to look at a galaxy more than 12 billion light years away, they were also looking back in time. And when they found organic molecules in that distant galaxy, they found them in the early Universe.

The organic molecules are usually found where stars are forming, but in this case, they’re not.

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Meteorites Bathed in Gamma Rays Produce More Amino Acids and Could Have Helped Life get Going on Earth

Carbonaceous chondrites like the Allende meteorite contain significant amounts of water and amino acids. Could they have delivered amino acids to early Earth and spurred on the development of life? Image Credit: By Shiny Things - originally posted to Flickr as AMNH - Meteorite, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4196153

Our modern telescopes are more powerful than their predecessors, and our research is more focused than ever. We keep discovering new things about the Solar System and finding answers to long-standing questions. But one of the big questions we still don’t have an answer for is: ‘How did life on Earth begin?’

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Webb Sees Organic Molecules in the Hearts of Galaxies, Surprisingly Close to Active Supermassive Black Holes

Artist view of an active supermassive black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched, one of its jobs was studying galactic formation and evolution. When we look around the Universe, today’s galaxies take the shape of grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy and giant ellipticals like M60. But galaxies didn’t always look like this.

We don’t see these shapes when we look at the most distant and most ancient galaxies. Early galaxies are lumpy and misshapen and lack the structure of modern galaxies.

A new study based on JSWT observations looks at organic molecules near galactic centers. The researchers say observing these molecules can teach us a lot about galactic evolution.

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