Many Worlds

Category: The Origin of Life (page 1 of 5)

After Seven Years Away Exploring an Asteroid, OSIRIS-REx is Landing Soon with Precious Samples

September 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

A replica of the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule descends under parachute during a dress rehearsal Aug. 30 in Utah. (NASA/Keegan Barber)

Bits of pebbles and dust from the asteriod Bennu that were collected during the long journey of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft should be landing in the Utah desert later this month.

The delivery will be a first for NASA — its first sample return from an asteroid and one of a very small handful of space objects ever brought to Earth by humans from anywhere but the moon.

The roughly two ounces (60 grams) of regolith collected from the surface of Bennu — a 4.5 billion year old remnant of the early solar system — are expected to give new insights into how our solar system planets were formed and about the mix of organic compounds present when life began on Earth.

The landing will be the finale to a quite remarkable 4.7 million mile journey to, around and onto a tiny ball of dirt, gravel and pebbles, and then back to Earth.  The spacecraft studied the asteroid from close orbit for almost two years before making its hazardous touch-and-go attempt to scoop up some regolith.

Though successful, that contact was a lot more fraught than expected.  The asteroid is held together by only very week gravitational forces, the scientists found, and it nearly swallowed OSIRIS-REx as a swamp would, kicking up a wall of debris into space that threatened the spacecraft’s safety.

Now comes the final challenge of the return capsule drop-off.  Once on Earth, the samples will go to  NASA’s Johnson Space Center for curating, examining and ultimately distributing to scientists for their long-awaited chance to learn up close about a celestial body untouched by the teeming biosphere of Earth.

The steroid Bennu, as imaged from about 15 miles away by OSIRIS-REx, the Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer. (NASA)

The returning asteroid sample from Bennu is not the first of its kind to be flown to Earth — that honor goes to the Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 spacecraft sent by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.  They returned with bits of dust and soil from two other asteroids, Ryugu (2020) and Itokawa (2010.)

Like Bennu, Ryugu is a carbonaceous asteroid, with a material makeup that includes substantial carbon.  These are the type of asteroid most common in the solar system and of the most interest to space scientists since they generally contain the organic (i.e,… Read more

A New Twist On Planet Formation

January 30, 2023 / / 1 Comment

This image of the nearby young star TW Hydrae reveals the classic rings and gaps that signify planets are being formed in this protoplanetary disk. {ESO, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)}

Before the first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s,  our own solar system served as the model for what solar systems looked like.  The physical and chemical dynamics that formed our system were also seen as the default model for what might have occurred in solar systems yet to be found.

As the number of exoplanets identified ballooned via the Kepler Space Telescope and others, and  it became clear that exoplanets were everywhere and orbiting most every star, the model of our own solar system became obviously flawed.  The first exoplanet identified, after all, was a “hot Jupiter” orbiting very close to its star — a planetary placement previously thought to be impossible.

With the growing number of known exoplanets and their most unusual placements, the field of planet formation — focused earlier on understanding on how the planets of our system came into being and what they were made of — expanded to take in the completely re-arranged planetary and solar system menagerie being found.

This was basic science seeking to understand these newfound worlds, but it also became part of the fast-growing field of astrobiology, the search for planets that might be habitable like our own.

In this context, planet formation became associated with the effort to learn more about the dynamics that actually make a planet habitable — the needed composition of a planet, the nature of its Sun, its placement in a solar system and how exactly it was formed.

So the logic of planet formation became the subject of myriad efforts to understand what might happen when a star is born, surrounded by a ring of gas and dust that will in time include larger and larger collections of solids that can evolve into meteors, planetesimals and if all goes a particular way, into planets.

A thin section of primitive meteorite under a microscope. The various colors suggest different minerals that comprise meteorites. The round-shaped mineral aggregates are called chondrules, which are among the oldest known materials in our solar system. (Science)

As part of this very broad effort to understand better how planets form, meteorites have been widely used to learn about what the early solar system was like. Meteorites are from asteroids that formed within the first several million years of planetary accretion.… Read more

Many Complex Organic Compounds –Evolved Building Blocks of Life — Are Formed Where Stars Are Being Born

December 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments

The Taurus Molecular Cloud is an active site for star formation.  It is also filled with complex organic molecules, including the kind that are building blocks for life.  The Cloud is 450 light years away, but similar star-forming regions with complex organics are found thoughout the galaxy. (Adapted, ESA/Herschel/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Recent reports about the detection of carbon-based organic molecules on Mars by the instruments of the Perseverance rover included suggestions that some of the organics may well have fallen from space over the eons, and were then preserved on the Martian surface.

Given the cruciality of organics as building blocks of life –or even as biosignatures of past life — it seems surely important to understand more about how and where the organics might form in interstellar space, and how they might get to Mars, Earth and elsewhere.

After all, “follow the organics” has replaced the NASA rallying cry to “follow the water” in the search for extraterrestrial life in the solar system and cosmos.

And it turns out that seeking out and identifying organics in space is a growing field of its own that has produced many surprising discoveries.  That was made clear during a recent NASA webinar featuring Samantha Scibelli of the University of Arizona, a doctoral student in astronomy and astrophysics who has spent long hours looking for these organics in space and finding them.

She and associate professor of astronomy Yancy Shirley have been studying the presence and nature of complex organics in particular in a rich star-forming region, the Taurus Molecular Cloud.

Using the nearby radio observatory at Kitt Peak outside of Tucson, she has found a range of complex organics in starless or pre-stellar cores with the Cloud.  The campaign is unique in that some 700 hours of observing time were given to them, allowing for perhaps the most thorough observations of its kind.

The results have been surprising and intriguing.

In this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across, the James Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust. The most active region appears to sparkle with massive young stars, appearing pale blue. (NASA/STScI)

A first take-away (surprising to those unfamiliar with the field) is that complex organics are often detected in these star-forming regions throughout the galaxy and cosmos — just as they were found in many regions of the Taurus cloud.… Read more

Clues About Conditions on Early Earth As Life Was Emerging

October 27, 2022 / / 0 Comments

What set the stage for the emergence of life on early Earth?

There will never be a single answer to that question, but there are many partial answers related to the global forces at play during that period.  Two of those globe-shaping dynamics are the rise of the magnetic fields that protected Earth from hazardous radiation and winds from the Sun and other suns,  and plate tectonics that moved continents and in the process cycled and recycled the compounds needed for life.

A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS)  reports from some of the world’s oldest rocks in Western Australia evidence that the Earth’s crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago.

Additionally, the study provides the earliest proof so far of the planet’s magnetic north and sound poles swapping places — as they have innumerable times since.  What the switching of the poles tells researchers is that there was an active, evolved magnetic field around the Earth from quite early days,.

Together, the authors say, the two findings offer clues into how geological  and electromagnetic changes may have produced an environment more conducive to the emergence of life on Earth.

 

The early Earth was a hellish place with meteor impact galore and a choking atmosphere.  Yet fairly early in its existence, the Earth developed some of the key geodynamics needed to allow life to emerge.  The earliest evidence that microbial life was presented is dated at 3.7 billion years ago, not that long after the formation of the planet 4.5 billion years ago. (Simone Marchi/SwRI)

According to author Alec Brenner, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab,  the new research “paints this picture of an early Earth that was already really geodynamically mature. It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.”

And speaking specifically of the novel readings of continental movement 3.25 billion years ago, fellow author and Harvard professor Roger Fu said that “finally being able to reliably read these very ancient rocks opens up so many possibilities for observing a time period that often is known more through theory than solid data.”… Read more

New Findings Suggest the Building Blocks For Life’s Genetic Structure May Well Have Arrived From Above

May 2, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Conceptual image of meteoroids delivering nucleobases to ancient Earth. The nucleobases are represented by structural diagrams with hydrogen atoms as white spheres, carbon as black, nitrogen as blue and oxygen as red. (NASA Goddard/CI Lab/Dan Gallagher)

All of life, from simplest to most complex, contains five information-passing compounds that allow the genetic code to work.  These nitrogen-based compounds, called nucleobases, are found in all the the DNA and RNA that  provide the instructions to build and operate every living thing on Earth.

How these compounds are formed, or where they come from, has long been a key question in astrobiology and the search for the origin of life.

Numerous theories have been advanced to explain their presence, including that they arrived on Earth via meteorites and the infall of dust.  But until recently, only three of these nucleobases have been found embedded in meteorites but, puzzlingly, the two others have not been found.

Now an international team centered in Japan has completed the search for nucleobases in meteorites by finding the remaining two, and so it appears possible that all these building blocks of the genetic code could have arrived on very early Earth from afar.

Yasuhiro Oba of the University of Hokkaido, and lead author of the new study in Nature Communications, said that  extraterrestrial material arrived in much greater quantities on the early Earth — during what is called the period of “late heavy bombardment” — and so the discovery “of all five primary nucleobases in DNA/RNA indicates that these components should have been provided to the early Earth with such extraterrestrial materials.”

This certainly does not mean that fully formed DNA or RNA was delivered to Earth.  Oba said the process of making those nucleic acids from components parts, including nucleobases, is under active study but is not particularly well understood.  But it does mean that essential building blocks for the genetic backbone of life clearly did arrive from space for possible use in the life-forming process.

“We don’t know how life first started on the Earth, but the discovery of extraterrestrial nucleobases in meteorites provides additional support for the theory that meteorite delivery could have seeded the early Earth with the fundamental units of the genetic code found in DNA and RNA in all life today,” said co-author Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center.

“These nucleobases are highly soluble in liquid water, so over time, any meteorite fragments exposed to water on the early Earth would be extracted from the meteorites into the water and could therefore contribute to the chemical inventory of the prebiotic soup from which life emerged.”… Read more

Can We Trust a Handful of Grains to Tell Us About the Early Earth? A Look at the Hayabusa2 Asteroid Sample

February 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments
The Hayabusa2 sample return capsule returning to Earth. The bright streak in the sky is the capsule, shock heated as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The bright lights on the ground are buildings. (JAXA)

In the early hours of December 6, 2020, what appeared to be a shooting star blazed across the sky above the Woomera desert in South Australia. The source was the sample return capsule from JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission, which contained precious material from a near-Earth asteroid known as Ryugu.

Within 60 hours, the capsule had been retrieved and flown to the curation facility at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan. In vacuum conditions to prevent any trace of contamination, the capsule was opened to reveal over 5 grams of asteroid grains.

This material is expected to have undergone little change since the early days of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago, and its highly anticipated analysis could provide new information about how the Earth acquired water and organics needed to begin life. The sample is the first ever collected from a carbonaceous (C-type) asteroid, which resemble primitive meteorites found to have a chemical composition close to that of the Sun.

Tet despite a rigorously planned and executed journey of over 5,000 million kilometers to bring back a pristine sample from space, concerns have remained. Chief among these are whether the rocky grains in the sample capsule were typical of the asteroid.

If the Hayabusa2 spacecraft had inadvertently gathered grains from an unusual spot, or if the grains had been altered during the collection and return to Earth, then deductions about the asteroid’s composition–and therefore our solar system’s past–could be wrong.  

The sample from asteroid Ryugu (from Yada et al. Nature Astronomy 2021)

The Hayabusa2 team had already gone to rather extreme lengths to mitigate this issue.

In addition to the rapid retrieval operation that ensured that the sample was not contaminated by our planet’s atmosphere, the spacecraft had performed the dangerous landing twice on the surface of asteroid Ryugu to collect samples from two separate sites.

One of these locations was close to where the spacecraft had made an artificial crater, ejecting material from beneath the asteroid’s surface to be gathered during the second collection operation. Rocky grains from below the top layer surface are expected to be particularly pristine, as they have been protected from the bombardment of sunlight, cosmic rays and micrometeorites.… Read more

The Hows and Whys of Mars Sample Return

April 14, 2021 / / 2 Comments

Combining two images, this mosaic shows a close-up view of the rock target named “Yeehgo” taken by the SuperCam instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. To be compatible with the rover’s software, “Yeehgo” is an alternative spelling of “Yéigo,” the Navajo word for diligent.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ASU/MSSS)

One of the fondest dreams and top priorities of space science for years has been  to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth to study in the kind of depth possible only in a cutting-edge laboratory.

While the instruments on Mars rovers can tell us a lot,  returning a sample to study here on Earth is seen as the  way to ultimately tease out the deepest secrets of the composition of Mars, its geological and geochemical history and possibly the presence of life, life fossils or of the precursor molecules  of life.

But bringing such a sample to Earth is extraordinarily difficult.  Unlike solar system bodies that have been sampled back on Earth — the moon, a comet and some asteroids — Mars has the remains of an atmosphere.  That means any samples would have to lift off in a rocket brought to Mars and with some significant propulsive power, a task that so far has been a technical bridge too far.

That is changing now and the Mars Sample Return mission has begun.  The landing of the Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Mars signaled that commencement and the rover will be used to identify, drill into and collect intriguing bits of Mars.  This is a long-term project, with the best case scenario seeing those Mars samples arriving on Earth in a decade.  So this entirely unprecedented, high-stakes campaign will be playing out for a long time.

“I think that Mars scientists would like to return as much sample as possible,” said Lindsay Hays, NASA Mars Sample Return deputy program scientist.  “Being able to return samples that we collected with purpose is how we take the next step in our exploration of Mars.”

“And it seems that there are still so many unknowns, even in our solar system, even with the planets right next door, that every time we do something new, we answer a couple of questions that we hoped to and but also find a whole bunch of new things that we never expected.”

“I am so excited to see what comes of this adventure.  And I think that is a feeling shared by Mars scientists and planetary scientists broadly.”… Read more

Japan’s Hayabusa2 Mission Returns to Earth

December 11, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Fireball created by the Hayabusa2 re-entry capsule as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere towards the ground (JAXA).

In the mission control room in Japan, all eyes were fixed on one of the large screens that ran along the far wall. The display showed the night sky, with stars twinkling in the blackness. We were waiting for a delivery from space.

Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission launched from the Tanegashima Space Center on December 3, 2014. The spacecraft was headed to asteroid Ryugu, with the intention of studying the tiny world and collecting a sample to return to Earth.

The mission would prove to be an incredible success. Not only did the spacecraft gather two samples from the asteroid, but it was the first mission to deploy autonomous rovers to explore an asteroid’s surface, generate an artificial crater in order to study the asteroid’s structure and collect a sample of the interior, and additionally, deploy a lander to make scientific measurements from the surface itself. The mission finale was to return the samples safely back to Earth on December 6, 2020. The grains in that sample container may hold clues as to how the Earth became habitable.

Ryugu is an example of a C-type or “carbonaceous” asteroid. These asteroids have undergone relatively little change since the start of the solar system, and are thought to contain hydrated minerals (minerals containing water in their structure) and possible organics. It is this class of asteroid that may have crashed into the early Earth and delivered the necessary tools for life to begin. Analysis of the Ryugu sample could therefore tell us about our own beginnings and how terrestrial planets develop habitable conditions.

Images before and after the first touchdown of Hayabusa2 on asteroid Ryugu, taken with CAM-H on February 21, 2019 (animation plays at 5x speed) (JAXA).

As the Hayabusa2 spacecraft drew near the Earth, five “trajectory control manoeuvres” (TCMs) were planned. The first four of these were designed to put the spacecraft onto a collision course with the Earth, aimed at the Woomera desert in Australia. The re-entry capsule would then be released, and the spacecraft would make a final manoeuvre to divert onto an orbit that swept past the Earth and back into deep space.

Despite the smooth progress so far, there were concerns. The capsule release mechanism had not been tested since launch six years previously and it was always possible that separation would fail.… Read more

Surprising Insights Into the Asteroid Bennu’s Past, as OSIRIS-REx Prepares For a Sample-Collecting “Tag”

October 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Artist rendering of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it will approach the asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of ancient, pristine solar system material. The  pick-up”tag” is scheduled for Oct. 20. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Arizona)

Long before there was an Earth, asteroids large and small were orbiting our young sun.  Among them was one far enough out from the sun to contain water ice, as well as organic compounds with lots of carbon.  In its five billion years or so as an object,  the asteroid was hit and broken apart by other larger asteroids, probably grew some more as smaller asteroids hit it,  and then was smashed to bits again many millions of years ago.  Some of it might have even landed on Earth.

The product of this tumultuous early history is the asteroid now called Bennu, and the destination for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission.  On October 20, the spacecraft will make its dramatic final descent, will touch the ground long enough to collect some samples of the surface, and then will in the months ahead return home with its prized catch.

The sample will consist of grains of a surface that have experienced none of the ever-active geology on Earth,  no modifications caused by life,  and little of the erosion and weathering.  In other words, it will be a sample of the very early solar system from which our planet arose.

“This will be our first chance to look at an ancient, carbon-rich environment – the most pristine example of the chemistry of the very early solar system,” said Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Space Flight Center and a co-investigator of the OSIRIS-REx team.  “Anything as ancient on early Earth would have been modified many times over.”

“But at Bennu we’ll see the solar system, and the Earth,  as it was chemically before all those changes took place.  This will be the kind of pristine pre-biotic chemistry that life emerged from.”

This image of Bennu was taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km).
(NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)

Bennu is an unusual asteroid.  It orbits relatively close to Earth — rather than in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — and that’s one of several main reasons why it was selected for a visit.  It is also an asteroid with significant amounts of primeval carbon and organics, which is gold for scientists eager to understand the early solar system, planet formation and the origin of life on Earth.… Read more

Thinking About Life (or Lyfe) Through The Prism of “Star Trek”

June 17, 2020 / / 1 Comment

This column was written for Many Worlds by Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett.  Wong is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington’s Astronomy and Astrobiology program and is a member of  NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) initiative as part of the university’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory team.  Bartlett is a postdoctoral scholar in Geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and has been a fellow at the Earth-Live Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo.

 

Spock communicates with a Horta,  a fictional silicon-based life form composed of molten rock and acid.  (Star Trek; CBS Studios)

By Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett

 

The search for extraterrestrial life is in its early phase still  and, the truth is, we don’t yet know if life exists beyond our pale blue dot.  Or, if it does, whether it will be easily recognizable or truly bizarre.

Predicting what might be out there, and how to find it, is a hypothesis-driven area of research at present — one that has given rise to hundreds of possible definitions for the “life” we are looking for.

But after grounding ourselves in scientific principles, it may be that our greatest tool is to let our imaginations fly. Science fiction often helps us embrace our ignorance of what might be out there.

In the Star Trek universe, our galaxy is teeming with life—both astonishingly familiar and incredibly different.

The familiar variety includes Mr. Spock, the U.S.S. Enterprise’s half-human, half-Vulcan science officer. He is the product of an extraordinary cosmic coincidence: the emergence of nearly identical biochemical machinery on two completely separate worlds. Vulcans—despite their pointy ears, upswept eyebrows, and a nearly religious devotion to bowl cuts—are incredibly similar to humans on the cellular, genetic, and metabolic level.

We can share meals, share air, and, yes, share intimacy. Even their green, copper-based blood is not as alien as it might seem; this trait is typical of most mollusks and crustaceans on Earth.

 

The Crystalline entity was a powerful, spaceborne creature characterized by a crystalline structure that resembled a large snowflake. (Star Trek;  CBS Studios)

But Star Trek also depicts life forms that are incredibly dissimilar from you, me, or Mr. Spock.

Take the Horta, for example. This lumpy mass, like a misshapen meatball crossed with a child’s volcano science experiment, is a silicon-based life form composed of molten rock and acid.

Then there’s Q, a non-corporeal being that possesses god-like powers which, it seems, are directed solely upon harassing Captain Jean-Luc Picard.… Read more

« Older posts

© 2023 Many Worlds

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑