Ancient Asteroid Yields Mysterious Remains of Life’s Basic Building Blocks Found

A team of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute in the United States has made a groundbreaking discovery on the Bennu Asteroid. The research team found remains of ancient brine, which is a salty residue, containing crucial minerals for life that have never been observed in asteroid samples before.

Discovery and Its Implications

According to the museum’s report, the discovery suggests that extraterrestrial brines provided a crucial environment for the development of organic compounds. The researchers’ work, published in the magazine Nature, reveals that evaporated water left a saline broth where salts and minerals allowed the elementary ingredients of life to intermingle and create more complex structures.

Sequence of Evaporated Minerals

Scientists have described a sequence of evaporated minerals dating from the early training of the solar system. The variety of minerals includes compounds that have never been observed in other extraterrestrial samples. The meteor curator of the museum and main co-author of the article, Tim McCoy, stated that “we know thanks to Bennu that the basic ingredients of life were combined in a really interesting and complex way in the Bennu parent body.” He also mentioned that they have discovered the “next step on the road to life.”

Formation of Bennu’s Parent Asteroid

Bennu’s parent asteroid, which was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, seems to have housed liquid water pockets. The new findings indicate that the water evaporated and left behind brines that resemble the salty scabs of the dry beds of the Earth’s lakes.

Orbit and Composition of Bennu

Bennu intrigued the researchers due to its orbit close to Earth and its composition rich in carbon. The scientists postulated that the asteroid contained traces of water and organic molecules and theorized that similar asteroids could have brought these materials to a primal Earth.

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Osiris-Rex Space Probe

In 2020, the NASA space probe Osiris-Rex collected Bennu samples, becoming the first American space mission to collect a sample of the surface of an asteroid. In 2023, Osiris-Rex passed through the Earth, dropped a capsule that contained the samples of Bennu, and the capsule landed in the Utah desert. The scientists picked it up to protect the samples from the Earth’s pollution.

Analysis of Collected Samples

In total, Osiris-Rex collected around 120 grams of material, which is approximately the weight of a soap tablet and twice the amount required for the mission. The samples were divided and lent to researchers around the world for analysis. Among them was the cosmic mineralogist of the Museum of Natural History of London and also the main co-author of the work, Sara Russell. Russell said it was “an absolute pleasure” to participate in this mission to try to “answer one of the most important questions of humanity: how life began.”

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