A container that contains a sample of Ryugu, ceded to the NASA by the Japanese space agency JAXA.Picture: NASA / Robert Markowitz
Japan’s Ministry of Education says more than 20 types of amino acids were detected in samples from an asteroid that were brought to Earth in December 2020, reports The Japan Times. Detection is the first evidence that amino acids exist in asteroids in space and has implications for understanding how these vital organic molecules came to Earth.
The spacecraft Hayabusa2 collected samples from an asteroid called Ryugu. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft landed on Ryugu, about 200 million miles from Earth, in 2019 and collected about 5.4 grams of samples from the surface and subsoil of the asteroid.
Ryugu is a carbon-rich fragment of a larger asteroid that formed from the same gas and dust that gave way to our solar system. Because of their age, the dust and rocks on the surface of Ryugu give scientists a glimpse of what material floated in the first solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
At the March Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, Hisayoshi Yurimoto, a geoscientist at Hokkaido University in Japan and a member of the Hayabusa2 team, described the distant asteroid as “the most primitive material in the solar system we have.” never studied, ”according to Space.com.
Today’s news reveals the considerable amount of amino acids in distant space rock, which members of the Hayabusa2 team believe could be spread across the solar system in the form of interplanetary dust.
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Amino acids are the basic components of proteins, making them essential organic molecules for life. Ancient Earth rocks have provided evidence that molecules similar to those found at Ryugu arrived here billions of years ago.
“Our ultimate goal is to understand how organic compounds formed in the extraterrestrial environment,” said Hiroshi Naraoka, a geochemist at Kyushu University in Japan and a member of the Hayabusa2 team, in a 2020 NASA statement. “So we want to analyze a lot of organic compounds, including amino acids, sulfur compounds, and nitrogen compounds, to build a history of the types of organic synthesis that happen to asteroids.”
It is possible that these essential organic molecules first reached Earth through the impacts of comets and asteroids, and Ryugu’s samples have now shown that these molecules exist in asteroids in space. This is important because the impacts of asteroids and comets on Earth are almost immediately contaminated with terrestrial matter, which can make it difficult for scientists to separate what was always in the rock from what had just contaminated it.
As more data from Ryugu samples are analyzed, we will get more information about the composition of the asteroid and how it formed. By comparing the results of the Ryugu material with the samples collected from Bennu, an asteroid visited by NASA in 2020, we will better understand the different chemical cocktails in the cosmos and perhaps how life came from all this.
More information: The asteroid sample brought to Earth exposes the hidden interior of Ryugu