"How life began on Earth is one of the biggest remaining questions in science. Now, NASA has taken a major step towards answering this query. The US space agency has discovered essential sugars on Bennu - an ancient asteroid 200 million miles away from Earth. The five-carbon sugar ribose was found on the asteroid, as well as six-carbon glucose. This marks the first time this sugar has been found in an extraterrestrial sample."
"In 2020, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission seized upon a close flyby, collecting samples from Bennu and returning them to Earth three years later, on 24 September 2023. Since then, scientists have been analysing the samples to learn more about the conditions in our solar system billions of years ago. In the latest study, the Tohoku University team set out to understand whether or not Bennu contains the building blocks of life."
Essential five-carbon sugar ribose and six-carbon glucose were detected in samples returned from asteroid Bennu. The sugars constitute the first detection of ribose in an extraterrestrial sample and join previously identified amino acids, nucleobases, carboxylic acids, and phosphates in the same material. Bennu is a roughly 500-metre-wide asteroid whose rocks formed about 4.6 billion years ago and passed close to Earth in 2020, enabling NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to collect and return samples on 24 September 2023. The presence of these sugars indicates that molecular precursors to DNA and RNA were widespread in the early solar system.
Read at Mail Online
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