This year has not had many good news to offer. But a special delivery from Space has been the perfect Christmas gift for the astronomers and astrobiologists trying to understand the origins of life on Earth. These scientists, from Japan, have been able to retrieve a small sample of dust from an asteroid that is millions of kilometers away from Earth. About a week ago, the Japanese spacecraft, Hayabusa-2, dropped off a small part of the asteroid Ryugu (Dragon Palace in Japanese) in Australia.
Can you guess the weight of the sample that was collected from the asteroid and will be studied by scientists all over the world? 0.1grams! Yes, you read it right – the sample is equal to the weight of a few grains of sugar! The question is how such a small speck of dust would decode the puzzle of origin of life on Earth. After all, asteroids are also pieces of rock, dust and minerals that are orbiting stars. So, what happened on Earth millions of years ago that led to life on our piece of rock and not on our neighboring rocks?
Ryugu is special because it contains the element Carbon that is an essential building block of life known on Earth. Interestingly, Ryugu, is part of a much bigger asteroid that scientists believe was formed during the formation of our solar system. To find traces (small amounts) of Carbon on this asteroid means that it could hold answers to the interaction of several different molecules that led to the evolution of life. For example, how were the amino acid and nucleic acid molecules formed, which are the building blocks of life as we know on Earth, and how did they end up making proteins and DNA?
Analyzing these samples is the biggest challenge of it all. The different molecules found in the speck of the asteroid are first separated and advanced molecular analysis must be performed to obtain any clues to their formation and interaction – the Sherlock Holmes way. Only difference in this case is that the scientists would be figuring out the mystery of who/what started life on Earth and the answer is not as straight-forward as “the butler did it”!
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