NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  1. Content with the tag: “meteorite

  2. Asteroid Served Up "Custom Orders" of Life's Ingredients


    A fragment from the Tagish Lake meteorite. Credit: Michael Holly, Creative Services, University of Alberta.

    Some asteroids may have been like “molecular factories” cranking out life’s ingredients and shipping them to Earth via meteorite impacts. Now it appears that at least one asteroid may have been less like a rigid assembly line and more like a flexible diner that doesn’t mind making changes to the menu.

    Astrobiologists at NAI’s Goddard Center for Astrobiology and Carnegie Institution of Washington team studying the carbon-rich Tagish Lake meteorite have discovered that different pieces of it have greatly differing amounts of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and essential ingredients to life as...

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  3. Building Blocks of Life Created in "Impossible" Place


    A typical example of a meteorite remnant linked to asteroid 2008 TC3, with a dark scruffy texture. Credit: Peter Jenniskens

    Researchers from the NASA Astrobiology Program have discovered amino acids in a meteorite where none were expected.

    “This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.” Glavin is lead author of a paper on this discovery appearing December 15 in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. “Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is...

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    Source: [NASA Press Release]

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  4. Mars Meteorite Debate Continues


    ALH84001 meteorite
    Scientists have reexamined the 1996 finding that a meteorite contains evidence that life may have existed on ancient Mars. The study argues that life remains the most plausible explanation for the materials and structures found in the meteorite.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  5. Fragments of Asteroid Impact are Collected and Analyzed



    Never before has an asteroid been both telescopically observed while in space, and then collected and analyzed after it’s hit the Earth. NAI astrobiologists from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the SETI Institute are part of the large, interdisciplinary team of scientists who undertook the investigation. Their results are published in a recent issue of Nature.

    Analysis of the carbon content in the fragments of 2008 TC3, as it is known, showed it to be mostly graphite-like, indicating that at some point in the past, the body had been subjected to extremely...

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