Science Friday - Building Blocks Of Life Found On Asteroid Bennu

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

About four and a half years ago, a spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx touched down on the surface of an asteroid called Bennu. It drilled down and scooped up samples of rock and dust and, after several years of travel, delivered those samples back to Earth.Since then, researchers around the world have been analyzing tiny bits of that asteroid dust, trying to tease out as much information as they can about what Bennu is like and where it might have come from. Two scientific papers published this week give some of the results of those experiments. Researchers found minerals that could have arisen from the drying of an icy brine, and a soup of organic molecules, including ammonia and 14 of the 20 amino acids necessary for life on Earth.Dr. Danny Glavin and Dr. Dante Lauretta join Flora Lichtman to talk about the samples, what their analysis is revealing, and what those findings could mean for the hunt for life elsewhere in the solar system.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Today on the podcast, how an asteroid sample is making astrobiology researchers rethink a couple things. I felt pretty discouraged, actually. I'm like, wow, this is 20 years of my research. You know, I can just flush down the toilet. About four and a half years ago, a spacecraft called Osiris Rex landed on the surface of an asteroid called Benu. It drilled down and scooped up samples of rock and dust. And after several years, years of travel delivered those samples back to Earth. Since then, researchers around the world have been analyzing tiny bits of that asteroid dust, trying to tease out as much information as they can about what Benu is like and where it might have come from. Two scientific papers published this week give some results of those experiments. Joining me now are Dr. Danny Glovin, senior scientist

at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and co-investigator on the Osiris Rex Asteroid sample return mission. And Dr. Dante Loretta, planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and leader of the Osiris Rex mission. He's also the author of Asteroid Hunter. Welcome to you both. Thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah. You two know each other, I gather. Yeah. Actually, Dante and I met 22 years ago where we shared a tent in Antarctica as part of the Ansmet meteorite hunting expedition and actually together discovered this rock, a meteorite from space, that had liquid water. water on it, which was clearly a sign of contamination. So even in the most pristine environment on earth, meteorites can still be contaminated. And this is where the idea for Osiris Rex was born.

Yeah, it was a really profound moment. Danny was well known for studying a famous Martian meteorite that had been found in Antarctica called Allen Hills 8401 that made quite an impact in the community when a group of scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center speculated that it might contain and signs of life on Mars. And he was really agitated by the water. And I remember vividly him saying amino acids could be exchanging with the meteorite right now. It felt like finding a treasure only to realize that it was all counterfeit. And that's when I think we both realized if we really want to pursue this science of understanding the origin of life and the role these carbon-rich asteroids play, we're going to have to go out and get some ourselves. Wow. So this, what we're talking

about today was really born 22 years ago in a tent in Antarctica. Yeah. Yeah. And we've been working together ever since. Dante, fast forward 22 years. Remind us what Benu is and why we wanted to go there. Benu is a near-earth asteroid, which means its orbit comes very close to that of the Earth, and it's somewhat infamous for being known as the most potentially hazardous asteroid. And that is not a coincidence because when we were designing a mission to go to an asteroid and collect a sample, we needed something that was relatively close to the Earth, dynamically speaking. And Benu has an orbit that really facilitates this kind of round trip that we went on. But our science, and especially the science that Danny is the expert in, was going after

organic molecules. And this asteroid dates back from the dawn of our solar system over four and a half billion years ago. And it contains a geologic record of organic molecular evolution. And it was the reason it rose to the top of our list when we were going through candidate selection for the mission target. How much of Benu were you able to scoop up? Like how much mucky dust are we talking about a pasta pot's worth, a coffee mug's worth? Oh, we're talking about a cupful, you know, 120 grams of material, which by the way, it was twice our requirement. So the science team was excited. to get that much material. I know it doesn't sound like much, but this is going to enable analyses

for decades to come. It's a bounty of material. And again, truly, this sample is a gift that we'll keep on giving. Okay. Once the samples were back, what happened next? How did you start to analyze them? Yeah, so we took some of this sample, a very small amount, a few tens of milligrams, and we basically boiled it in water. We made a Benu tea, so we literally made the tea. And then we analyzed the extract using several different types of mass spectrometers to really look at the masses of the individual compounds in this tea. And we found right away that it was this complex soup of organic molecules. Incredible.

Almost 10,000 nitrogen-bearing organic molecules. So super complex. And among that, we found 14 of the 20 protein amino acids in life on Earth and also all five nucleal bases that make up the genetic code in DNA and RNA. Is that a big deal? It's a very big deal, yes. It's a huge deal. And what makes this so important is that we're detecting these in a pristine sample.

So many of these compounds have been found before in meteorites, like the one Dantai and I were looking at in Antarctica, but they've been compromised, both from atmospheric entry heating, but also biology on the earth. So with the Benu samples, they were protected from the heat. atmospheric entry. They were protected from the terrestrial biota, the biosphere. And so we can trust these results. I mean, we're fully confident finally in these detections of the building blocks of life. So this is like exactly the problem that you pointed out in Antarctica, that it was counterfeit. You now do not have that problem. Correct. Yeah, that's right. And that was really the

whole motivation for the mission. And, you know, it only took us 22 years to realize that dream. Yeah, this is definitely not a sprint. It's not a sprint. This is a marathon. It's a career commitment, absolutely, when you sign up for a project of this magnitude. Was there anything in that sample that surprised you? Yeah, there's several things for me. One of the things we noticed right away when we poured out the sample from the collector in the lab at Johnson Space Center was that most of the material is really dark and black. And it's actually hard to describe it. When you see photos of it, they're stretched so you can see some of the contrast. But when you see with your eye, it doesn't look quite real. It's so dark, it looks like a hole in the deck that it's sitting on there.

But some of the particles are really bright and white, and they draw your eye immediately to them. And we were very excited because they look like salt. And that's a companion paper that's coming out in nature, along with Danny's organic study, is that we have evaporate minerals, minerals that formed from a large body of salty water that evaporated away and left these salt crystals behind. And they're beautiful crystals. They're not just embedded in the clays. They're growing into what looked like void spaces.

So they've got beautiful bladed structures. The kind of thing mineral collectors dream about for their collection because they're so stunning just in their appearance. What does it mean to have these salts in there? It means that Benu came from a very wet world. And I dare to speculate maybe even something like an ocean world. You know, we're very interested in these objects of the outer solar system like Europa, which is one of the moons of Jupiter, or Enceladus, which is orbiting around Saturn, because they have icy crusts with deep bodies of liquid water underneath them. We can't say that it's quite that extensive of a system, but it had to be very large in spatial scale, at least kilometers across.

And some of Danny's results actually confirm that Benu's material must have originally formed at least. maybe as far as Saturn is orbiting today. Yeah, this is actually one of the big surprises was the high amounts of ammonia. Now, ammonia is important for many biological processes as part of the nitrogen cycle. It's volatile. And so the fact that we're seeing such high amounts meant that this stuff had to have formed way out in a colder region of the solar system, far from the sun, where ammonia ice is stable. And I also add that the ammonia was also exciting because this is an important chemical precursor. a building block needed for the formation of amino acids and the nucleal basis in DNA and RNA.

So the fact that we were seeing it in Beno at such high levels, just to give you an idea, the amounts about 100 times the levels of ammonia that you might find in your backyard soil. So there's a significant amount there. And again, as Dante noted, this kind of points towards outer solar system origin of some of these ices. Danny, any other surprises in these building blocks of life, things you did see or didn't see things that were unusual? Yeah, so for me, the biggest kind of surprise was related to this property called handedness or chirality of amino acids. So amino acids come in two forms, left-handed and right-handed, non-superimposable mirror images. So if you take a hand in your palm, you put

it palms down on top of each other, your thumb stick out. Amino acids have that same property. And all life on Earth uses only the left-handed form in proteins, not the right-handed form. And it's always been a mystery why that happened. Why did life turn left? Now, we've been studying meteorites for decades, and we found that some meteorites, especially ones that had composition similar to Benu, had excesses of the left-handed form,

up to 60% more than the right-handed form. And so this was kind of hinting at maybe an early solar system bias towards left-handed amino acids, which is why life turned left. So we were expecting, I was expecting, that when we got these Benu samples back that we would also see these left-handed excesses, but we didn't. They were equal

mixtures of the left and right-handed form. And I remember when we were first looking at the data, I was like, oh, my God, I felt pretty discouraged, actually. I'm like, wow, this is 20 years of my research, you know, and I can just flush down the toilet. Because you've been working on the left-handed hypothesis. Yeah, we had this left-handed hypothesis. But again, this is exactly why we explore, right? This is exactly why we do missions like Osiris Rec, so we can get closer to the truth. Yeah, and it's also good news to me because it really convinces the team that these are not contaminations from biology. Because if it was biologically contaminated, it would be exclusively the left-handed versions. So we've done a good job of keeping the sample pristine all the way to

Danny's labs and his team's labs to show that. So for me, it's good news because a big part of the challenge of the mission was preventing anything from Earth from contaminating this. What kind of crazy precautions did you have to take to prevent the sample from being contaminated? I think the one that drove the engineering team the craziest was we prohibited them from using nylon when they were assembling the spacecraft. And they couldn't believe the request. And we went into the clean room where they assemble these vehicles. And I don't remember, Danny, how many different nylon components we pointed to and said, you got to get rid of that, you got to get rid of this, you can't have this in the lab, you got to find an alternate. And they

were like, this is crazy, how are we going to do this? And then we sat them down and we explained the science. And they got really excited. And they're like, okay, it's a challenge. But they were up for it. And as we've just shown, it's turned out to be incredibly successful. Yeah, just to follow up. Nylon will break down to form amino acids, which is why it was such a big concern to to eliminate it. After the break, zooming out from the microscopic to the big picture. What does this finding mean for the search for alien life? Just to be clear, we're not finding any evidence for biology on asteroid venue. We're seeing the building blocks of life, not life itself.

Stick around. So just big picture here, does finding these building blocks of life change the way we think about how life might have evolved on Earth, does it suggest that Benu or a Benu sibling could have brought these building blocks of life or brought life to Earth? How does it impact our big picture? I mean, absolutely. I think, you know, what we're finding with the Benu samples in detecting these building blocks of life in Benu that suggests that asteroids like Benu and other materials could have delivered the raw ingredients necessary for the emergence of life, not.

not only on Earth, but elsewhere. I mean, we're also finding these things were spread across the solar system. So as we go look for life elsewhere on Mars or Enceladus or Europa, we know that these places also had these starting materials. So that's actually very exciting. Just to be clear, we're not finding any evidence for biology on asteroid venue. We're seeing the building blocks of life, not life itself. Now, that being said, we know from these analyses that,

building blocks could be delivered to other environments, the service of Mars, incorporated into theceladus. And those may be environments where you could have had more complex chemical evolution that led to life. So we've got the ingredients, but again, no evidence of detecting actual life in the asteroid beno samples. And for me, that presents a really exciting opportunity because we have clearly some sort of liquid water body interacting with these rocks and producing these interesting organic molecules, but the origin of life didn't occur on Benu's parent body. So what is missing? What happens that takes that rock and turns it into something that's alive? That's still, to me, the greatest mystery facing science today. And now we have geologic samples

that we can do direct comparisons. These rocks from Benu look a lot like rocks that are forming at the mid-ocean ridge right here on Earth at these famous hydrothermal vents called the white smokers. And so by doing a comparative analysis between those environments, similar, really interesting carbonate-rich lakes on Earth, we can say this system, it has no biology and we can understand what its signatures are. Let's compare it to something from modern Earth that's rich in biology and then use the difference in those two signals to start scanning the surfaces of Mars, looking at the salts on Europa and Enceladus and saying, does it look like something that formed in the asteroid with no biology? or does it look a little more like Earth, where we know biology is influencing the different mineral phases that are forming? Yeah, I mean, that's actually a key point, Dante. I mean, these samples are providing a really important chemical baseline for non-life, right?

And we call it abiotic baseline. And so as we go to Mars and bring back samples from Mars and explore Europa and Celadus, we can be looking for different chemical signatures that might be more suggestive of biology. This has been in the works for decades. What is it like for you all to have these findings start to roll in? It's, sometimes it's hard to believe in my life and what I've been able to do and how privileged I've been to be able to lead a program like this. And the results are surpassing my wildest dreams.

So I'm just ecstatic. The team is excited. They're working hard. And I think for me, the most gratifying aspect is there's a lot of early career scientists that are just getting started. and you see the wonder in their eyes when we bring them into the laboratory and we say, hey, here's some rocks that we've collected off the surface of an asteroid. Are you interested in helping us analyze them?

And they're hooked. And I know we've got them and they're going to go off and do great things. Danny? Yeah. I mean, for me, I mean, this entire day, honestly, I've just been pinching myself. I mean, literally. Am I living a dream? I mean, this feels like a science fiction story.

All the things that had to go right with OREX to get these samples back. the number of people that it took to make this happen. I mean, I can't believe we're here, but we're getting some incredible results, exciting results. We're learning more about, you know, the origin of the solar system and potentially even life itself from these precious samples from Benu. And as Dante said, we're going to have these for decades to come. I mean, we've actually frozen some of this material

and a minus 80C freezer that might be opened 50 years from now and studied using instruments that don't even exist today. I'm so looking forward to the years to come and the new discoveries that come out of these samples. Do you think that we'll have an answer to some of these big questions about the origin of life, the early solar system within our lifetimes? I'm optimistic, yeah. I think we're getting better at searching for signs of life across our solar system

and especially with extrasolar planetary systems. I think we will find it. It has to be there. my instinct just tells me it can't be isolated to just the earth. And once that happens, then it'll be a bonanza of scientific insights and investigation. Yeah, I mean, I feel the same. I mean, we're here. You know, we're a living example that life's possible.

The building blocks, the puzzle pieces are everywhere. I think we just need to find the right environment, bring back the right samples. I think sample return, at least in our solar system, has to be part of this equation because we can, again, bring back these pristine materials, right, and get answers that are closer to the truth. So I'm optimistic as well that we'll find something. Well, I hope for many more sample returns, including one to Mars. I know that one's hanging in the balance.

And thank you both. So fascinating. Yeah, thank you, Flora. It's been a real pleasure. Yes, thank you. Dr. Danny Glovin, senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-investigator on the Osiris Rex asteroid sample return mission. And Dr. Dante Loretta, planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and leader of the Osiris Rex mission. And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make the show happen, including Kathleen Davis.

Diana Plasker. Beth Rami. Danielle Johnson. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.