Last week, we turned our gaze toward the hidden oceans within our solar system. Today, we’re looking even closer to home—specifically at the rocky neighbors sharing our cosmic backyard.
John Gianforte, director of the UNH Observatory, joined us to break down the groundbreaking findings from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Launched in 2016, the spacecraft traveled to Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, where it performed a high-stakes "touch-and-go" maneuver to collect physical samples from the surface.
After a seven-year journey, the mission successfully jettisoned its payload into the Utah desert in 2023, delivering 121 grams of extraterrestrial material. Since then, scientists have been peering into the dust of another world, and what they’ve found is shifting our understanding of the universe.
The samples didn't just contain dust and rock. Analysts discovered a primordial soup of sorts: sugars, water, and 14 different amino acids. "Amino acids are important chemical building blocks for proteins," Gianforte explains. "They’re really important. And no one really expected to find them in space. That was surprising."
While the presence of these acids is a major milestone, Gianforte is careful to clarify that we haven't found "aliens" just yet. Rather, we've found the kit required to build them.
"It doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination that there’s life on an asteroid," says Gianforte. "But it’s really remarkable how plentiful the basic building blocks for life are in space."
The discovery suggests that the raw materials necessary for life as we know it may be more common throughout the galaxy than we ever dared to hope.
Cosmically Curious is a partnership between UNH, St. Anselm College, the McAuliffe Shepard Discovery Center and NHPR.
Have a space related question? Email us at Cosmic@NHPR.org
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