Amino acid found in Stadust samples

[docm]

Link....

NASA scientists studying the comet samples returned by the Stardust spacecraft have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life. Stardust captured the samples from comet Wild 2 in 2004 and returned them to Earth in 2006. "Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

Proteins are a major component of all living cells, and amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins.

As Stardust passed through dense gas and dust surrounding the icy nucleus of Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt-2"), special collection grids filled with aerogel – a novel sponge-like material that's more than 99 percent empty space – gently captured samples of the comet's gas and dust. The grid was stowed in a capsule which detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth on January 15, 2006. Since then, scientists around the world have been busy analyzing the samples to learn the secrets of comet formation and our solar system's history.
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[3488]

Thanks docm,

I had not seen this.

It certainly bolsters the Pamsperma theory as to the transportaion of prebiotic chemistry around the solar system by comets & asteroids, also shows that the early Earth could most certainly had received early anino acids this way.

A fascinating find.

Andrew Brown.

 

[CommonMan]

Thanks docm,

I had not seen this.

It certainly bolsters the Pamsperma theory as to the transportaion of prebiotic chemistry around the solar system by comets & asteroids, also shows that the early Earth could most certainly had received early anino acids this way.

A fascinating find.

Andrew Brown.

I have heard this before. Does it mean that they think the Earth didn't have any anino acids?

 

[3488]

Hi CommonMan.

Not necessarily. It means that comets & asteroids could have been an additional source, rather than a sole source. I suspect the Earth has had its own Amino Acids all along, but comets & asteroids most likely boosted the quantities.

Andrew Brown.

 

[thermionic]

An exciting result. For me, this is further suggestion that amino acids can form in a wide variety of chemistry & conditions. If amino acids correlate with the existence of life, we can expect more opportunities for biology in weird and unexpected places. High atmosphere of gas giants? Interplanetary gass clouds? As for panspermia, I think the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that amino acids probably formed readily enough in the early Earth environment that no off-planet source would have been needed. If nucleic acids had turned up in the star dust, I'd be more receptive to the panspermia idea. Cheers, /jd

 

[MeteorWayne]

This might be better off in SS&A even though the results are from a particular mission. It's a tough call. I'll leave it here for now.

Wayne

 

[kg]

I thought this article was very interesting. They seem to think that some of the comet material formed close to the sun then migrated to the outer solar system.

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news116.html
What we found was remarkable! Instead of rocky materials that formed around previous generations of stars we found that most of the comet's rocky matter formed inside our solar system at extremely high temperature. In great contrast to its ice, our comet's rocky material had formed under white-hot conditions. Even though we confirmed Comets are ancient bodies with an abundance of ice, some of which formed a few tens of degrees above absolute zero at the edge of the solar system, we now know that comets are really a mix of materials made by conditions of both "fire and ice".