Scientists find amino acids, salts and other compounds in samples from asteroid Bennu

[Still Waters]

Asteroid Bennu is thought to be made of rubble fragments from a 4.5-billion-year-old parent body, containing materials that originated beyond Saturn, which was destroyed long ago in a collision with another object. In two new papers, scientists report the detection of amino acids (including 14 of the 20 used in terrestrial biology), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ammonia and other compounds, as well as a variety of salts, including sodium carbonates, phosphates, sulfates, and chlorides, in the Bennu samples, which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered to Earth in 2023.

https://www.sci.news/space/amino-acids-salts-asteroid-bennu-samples-13624.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02472-9

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08495-6

Related:

[seasmith]

 

"Scientists found all five nucleobases – the genetic components of DNA and RNA – within the Bennu samples."

 

Credit: NASA Goddard/OSIRIS-REx

"The Bennu samples exhibit an equal abundance of left-handed and right-handed amino acids, like the mirror images of L and D-serine pictured here. This means that early Earth may have started out with equal abundances as well, before life developed a left-handed biology."

... 

nucleobases that encode genetic information in DNA and RNA."

 

 

 

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14774/

[kingsway]

bs nasa lies alot