Posted on Feb 12, 2025
APOD: 2025 February 12 – Asteroid Bennu Holds the Building Blocks of Life
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Good evening, Rallypoint, and welcome to this edition of Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) for February 12, 2025.
Our friend SGT James Murphy posted a link to a video about chirality several days ago, and today's APOD bought that to mind (although I cannot find the post!). Chirality is a property of asymmetry that makes an object or a system distinguishable from its mirror image. And that gets us back to today' APOD.
Why? Consider the findings from Asteroid Bennu: an equal mix of left-handed (e.g. Earthly) and right-handed amino acids. A chiral object and its mirror image are called enantiomorphs (Greek for "opposite forms") or, when referring to molecules, enantiomers. Life forms deal with two enantiomers of the same compound in drastically different ways. For example, left-handed propoxyphene (Norvad) is an anti-cough agent; right-handed propoxyphene (Darvon) is a pain killer.
This 30-second video clip was made by the NASA spacecraft that would eventually land on the asteroid, gather samples, and return them to Earth. The samples not only contained 14 out of the 20 known amino acids that are the essential building blocks of life...they contained a mix of both left- and right-handed (e.g. chiral) amino acids. Which begs a number of questions. One of which is: what other forms of life might we run into?
Our friend SGT James Murphy posted a link to a video about chirality several days ago, and today's APOD bought that to mind (although I cannot find the post!). Chirality is a property of asymmetry that makes an object or a system distinguishable from its mirror image. And that gets us back to today' APOD.
Why? Consider the findings from Asteroid Bennu: an equal mix of left-handed (e.g. Earthly) and right-handed amino acids. A chiral object and its mirror image are called enantiomorphs (Greek for "opposite forms") or, when referring to molecules, enantiomers. Life forms deal with two enantiomers of the same compound in drastically different ways. For example, left-handed propoxyphene (Norvad) is an anti-cough agent; right-handed propoxyphene (Darvon) is a pain killer.
This 30-second video clip was made by the NASA spacecraft that would eventually land on the asteroid, gather samples, and return them to Earth. The samples not only contained 14 out of the 20 known amino acids that are the essential building blocks of life...they contained a mix of both left- and right-handed (e.g. chiral) amino acids. Which begs a number of questions. One of which is: what other forms of life might we run into?
APOD: 2025 February 12 – Asteroid Bennu Holds the Building Blocks of Life
Posted from apod.nasa.gov
NASA
Space
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Astronomy
Posted 10 mo ago
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Very strange that that space rock “contained 14 out of the 20 known amino acids that are the essential building blocks of life” and “an even mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids -- in contrast to our Earth which only has left-handed ones.” These astonishing details of a “space rock” can only reflect an astonishing Creator who gives such attention to minute details about even something so far far away as to possibly not even being discovered by God’s precious Mankind.
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