Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Life's Building Blocks Found in an "Impossible" Meteorite

Episode Date: March 7, 2011

Life's Building Blocks Found in an Impossible" Meteorite"Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The building blocks of life in a nearly impossible place, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It was the first recovered meteorite to be observed before it hit our planet. Inside that tortured rock, scientists have found amino acids, the complex molecules that are the basis of life. We'll talk with the Goddard Space Flight Center's Michael Callahan about this surprising find. Our hearts go out to all the scientists and engineers who took part in the

Glory mission. That Earth-observing satellite failed to make it into orbit last week. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, will share his own observations. And we'll save time for another conversation with my friend Bruce Betts. He'll tell us what's up and easy to see in the night sky. Bruce and I will also give away another Livio Carman car audio player. Up first is our weekly conversation with the Planetary Society's science and technology coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, more great stuff in the blog to talk about this week. Much more than we'll have time to talk about. But oddly, I realized we haven't talked about Mars and the rovers in a long time.

And I guess I should say the rover. We still haven't talked about Mars and the rovers in a long time. And I guess I should say the rover. We still haven't heard from Spirit, right? Still haven't heard from Spirit. We're getting very close to the longest solar day on Mars of the year. And if we get past that and haven't heard from Spirit, then I think hope is really going to fade, even among the most hopeful of people. But they're still trying. They're still trying to raise her. All right. Fingers still crossed at this end, but not looking too good. On the other hand, Opportunity is making progress, but slow progress. Well, it's actually very fast progress. It just looks slow when you measure it by the rising of the mountains on the horizon. Opportunity has been in a very flat place

for all of its mission. And now, of course, it's headed toward the rim of Endeavour Crater, which is still, I forget exactly, about five kilometers away. But we're kind of measuring its progress by looking at this line of mountains that's on the horizon. And every time there's a new dump of data to the planetary data system, I go in there and try to make beautiful views of those distant hills and pull out the most detail that I can possibly get from them. But they're just not getting bigger fast enough for me anyway. Of course, there's been six more months of driving since the last data dump and Opportunity has made a lot of progress since then. But it's still it's a long haul to get to that crater rim, but she should be there by the end of the year. And they're still pretty pictures. They are very pretty.

be there by the end of the year. And they're still pretty pictures. They are very pretty. One other topic we can talk about. You posed a question to a project manager about how do you turn off a spacecraft? Yeah, this was actually a question from a reader because I'd mentioned a couple times that they're talking now about decommissioning Stardust. Stardust has just completed its extended mission with a very successful flyby of Temple 1. And the spacecraft has basically no fuel left. So there's really nothing left that they can do with it because once it runs out of fuel, then it won't be able to talk to Earth anymore because it won't be able to point at Earth anymore. So now they have to neatly end the life of the spacecraft. And the most critical thing with ending a spacecraft mission is to make sure that its radio transmitter never transmits again. Or else you get something like that zombie sat that was in Earth orbit for a long time that was wildly transmitting and not listening.

And when you do that, you can step on the transmissions of other spacecraft and actually cause risk to other missions, even though there's no actual risk of collision between spacecrafts. So the most important thing to do is to make sure that not only is the radio transmitter turned off, but that it will never be able to come on again. And in Stardust's case, they're going to make sure that the batteries are completely drained. It's a fascinating piece. There is more to it. I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Planetary Society blog maintained by our friend Emily. Thanks again, Emily. Talk to you next week. Thank you, Matt. She is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Bill's up next, and then a really interesting conversation about a meteorite that had all kinds of lovely secrets hiding inside it. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here. This week, a very big disappointment when the Glory spacecraft failed to separate from its rocket booster and had to be crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Now, Glory is not an acronym. It stands for this spacecraft that was going to research the aerosols, the tiny particles and droplets in the Earth's atmosphere,

especially black carbon, the soot that comes out of old-style diesel exhaust and so on. Now, this is very important for climate change, and a glory is something you can see on a foggy morning around your own head. It's the halo that's often depicted in Renaissance-style art. And so the halo is caused by these droplets in the air. The sunlight goes into the droplet, bounces to your eye, and you see this rainbow around your own head. I have also taken a picture of a halo around my own camera. It's quite remarkable. All that aside, it's one more time we cannot study the Earth's climate. This is the same kind of rocket with the same kind of fairing that made the OCO,

the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, fail. And this is very serious business. This Glory satellite was going to get in the A-train. This is a string of satellites that's monitoring the Earth's climate in low Earth orbit. And without this satellite in there, we're not going to get as many data on the Earth's atmosphere at a time when the Earth's climate is changing. Everybody thought they got this fairing, this thing that makes the air flow smoothly or fairly over the rocket fuselage, but it blew up again.

So I'm very much hoping that this gets priority and gets rebuilt. I mean, it was almost half a billion dollars, $400 million. And we are unable to monitor the Earth's climate as well as we should be, should be able to. This is serious business, everybody. I'm sorry it happened. And I hope we can get back to work on it as soon as possible because it could, dare I say it, change the world. Well, I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the frustrated planetary guy. 2008 TC3 was quite an asteroid. It may have formed at the same time the Earth was coalescing.

At some point, it apparently suffered a stupendous collision. And all this was long before it fell to Earth in 2008. Fragments were located in the Sudan and rushed to labs for examination. It wasn't much later that Peter Janiskans of the SETI Institute suggested those fragments be analyzed for the presence of amino acids. Two labs took on the challenge, and two papers resulted. One came from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, or more specifically, the Astrobiology Analytical Lab in the Goddard Center for Astrobiology. Last December, lead author Daniel Glavin and his team reported that those big molecules,

the basis of even bigger protein molecules, had been found. Michael Callahan is a research physical scientist on that Goddard team. We talked via Skype a few days ago. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio from your lab there at the Goddard Space Flight Center. I'm wondering if when this idea of cracking open this meteorite that had been through so much was brought to you guys with the proposal that you look for amino acids or at least organics, did anybody think this was crazy? A little bit. Actually, thank you for having me on your show. But yeah, when we were kind of making a first guess, we were standing in front of the instrument waiting for the analysis to happen. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much,

and we were just kind of looking at the screen waiting for something to happen. And when it did, we couldn't believe it. Because what we were told is that this meteorite experienced pretty high temperatures, and you don't expect organics, especially the type of organics that we look for, like amino acids, should survive under these conditions. And so we weren't really expecting much. And when it did happen, it really was a big surprise. I immediately thought, well, the heat that this thing experienced was probably when it entered Earth's atmosphere, as a lot of people witnessed, which we'll come back to.

But apparently this thing had been through a heck of a lot. I guess it was one of the things that helped make this a pretty amazing rock even before it got to you guys and the folks at Scripps for testing? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, when it comes to the atmosphere, usually it heats up the outer surface, and so you sometimes get a fusion crust. But people that study the mineralogy look at the whole meteorite through different layers, and they can see what extent of heating that the asteroid has experienced. So it looked like it was heated up pretty hotly, maybe from 1,100 to 1,300 degrees Celsius. So about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more than that.

Yep. Just incredible. I mean, these things, amino acids, they don't like that kind of heat, do they? No, not at all. And from past studies from our group, we find that just half that temperature usually destroys most of the amino acids. But one thing about this particular asteroid is it looks like it's pretty unique in that it's not one uniform material. Almohadaceto is classified as a uralite, but what people are finding is that this is a mixture of different meteorite types. And so there was always the possibility that after this meteorite or asteroid formed in space, it actually broke apart in a collision. And then when it reassembled, it might have taken other meteorite material with it. And so it's always possible that you're getting formation of organics with other meteorite types that get mixed in,

and then you get a hodgepodge of different meteorite types, and what we get back is what we analyze. Listen, I want to ask you, before we continue in that vein, can you explain how it got that name you just gave it? Because I've only referred to it so far as 2008 TC3, not nearly as romantic a name. So the story goes is that when the asteroid came into the atmosphere and landed in the Sudan, it passed over train station number six, I believe. And so that's the translation for that name. I think it's like rail station number six. So that's Allah Mahatma Sita. So the asteroid itself is 2008 TC3, but the meteorite that gets referred to now is Almohadaceta. And actually, Almohadaceta refers to a long list of fragments that were covered.

So really, they also have a number designation followed after it. So we looked at Almohadaceta fragment number four. Now, about those amino acids, and I guess we have to include somewhere in this conversation the old cliche, the building blocks of life. You didn't find a whole lot of them, but again, finding anything was a surprise. That's correct. We have really good instruments with very sensitive methods to detect these amino acids. You know, a lot of times when you look at other meteorites, even though it says that there's a lot of amino acids, you're still talking about trace amounts. There's always, it's in low parts per million or parts per billion concentrations.

So they're pretty low to begin with anyway. But yeah, it is definitely a complete surprise finding amino acids in this meteorite, especially when it looked like it was heated up to such high temperatures. How did you determine that this wasn't just a contamination? After all, the fragment, not the interior, of course, but it had been handled quite a bit. Well, that's a great question. And so we have two clues on that. And one of them is that we look for different types of amino acids. We look for the amino acids that do show up in biology, but we also look for other types of amino acids that are non-protein amino acids. We look for the amino acids that do show up in biology, but we also look for other types of amino acids that are non-protein amino acids. And in Almohadaceta, we find both. So that

was kind of the first clue that we had that we were looking at an extraterrestrial origin for these amino acids. The second clue is that amino acids and other types of molecules have a property called chirality, which I guess the simplest way of putting it is that molecules have a handedness to them. So there's a left-hand and a right-hand form of these amino acids. And in biology, it predominantly uses the left-hand form of the amino acid. But when you usually make these things in a synthetic reaction, you get a mixture of both. You get a mixture of left-hand, right-hand, and amino acids. And so that's what we're finding in Almohadacita, is that for some of the amino acids that we study, we find a 50-50 mixture of the left-hand and right-handed amino acids,

which would indicate that it's an extraterrestrial origin and not something like a biological contamination, a terrestrial contamination on Earth. I suppose we should add that left-handed in all of life as we know it. That's correct. But life does use D. I mean, there are various organisms that can use D amino acids, but it's really predominantly left-handed amino acids. I'll return with more from Mike Callahan about the amino acids found in a meteorite.

This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show.

Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Amino acids shouldn't have been able to survive the punishment they received in asteroid 2008 TC3. Yet they did.

That's what a Goddard Space Flight Center team discovered. Michael Callahan is a member of that team. He is excited not just about learning how they survived, but about how common these building blocks of life are out there in space. Does this tell us more about how common amino acids probably are in the universe? It does. It's definitely a surprise. It looks like you can form these things in a variety of conditions. I mean, in the end, we don't know how these amino acids formed in this particular asteroid, because maybe there was some complex mixing going on in space. There's always the possibility that it could have formed on a different parent body and got mixed in. But there's the possibility that this is a different

type of synthesis, because we're seeing a really different distribution of amino acids in this meteorite compared to the other ones we studied. So if it is going through a different synthetic pathway, it just shows you how diverse, how many different methods that you could have to build amino acids. And yeah, to answer your question, not only do we find amino acid formation on these types of asteroid parent bodies, but they're really easy to make with simple gas mixtures and a simulated early Earth setting such as prebiotic chemistry. You can make amino acids pretty easily too.

So it seems like it's such an easy way to make these types of building blocks. You could see maybe how they could be around on an early Earth and get used later on. be around on an early Earth and get used later on. I assume that this data is also at least friendly to the idea of life elsewhere. Absolutely. But to go from the building blocks of proteins to life is a huge, long path. And we haven't figured that one out yet. We haven't figured that one out yet.

If you do, you let me know. You'll be the first. Yep. There is another lab, the Scripps Institution, much closer to me here, actually, in La Jolla, California. And I guess their results were pretty much the same as yours? That's correct. So they also looked at amines, which are another important group of molecules. But we did a tandem analysis, and we basically got the same results. So it was a nice confirmation to see that what we were seeing was definitely true.

This is far from the only sample that you guys have been able to look at, and it's a nice follow-on for us, because it was just last week on this show that we were talking about the Stardust flyby of Comet Tempel 1. But you were looking at some of the talking about the Stardust flyby of Comet Temple 1. But you were looking at some of the earlier work that Stardust did. That's right. Our laboratory participated in some of the analysis in which Jamie Alsula Cook looked at Stardust foils, actually. So the cometary particles that were captured in the aerogel were also backed on plates

of aluminum foil. At least I believe it's aluminum foil. Pretty close to that, I think, yeah. Yeah. And we received some of that aluminum foil for analysis, and the laboratory detected the amino acid glycine. And what she did was she measured the compound-specific isotopic ratio of carbon for the glycine and found it to have an extraterrestrial signature.

So that was the first detection of glycine in a comet, and to make sure that it really is indigenous to the comet, that was a really nice result for the laboratory and for NASA. Something else that you mentioned to me before we started recording was very intriguing, and that was, I guess, that returning now to this asteroid-turned-meteorite. I guess there was some suggestion that this be treated as if it was an analog for a sample return mission. That's right. One of the things about 2008 TC3 is that they did do some space observations before it came to Earth

through reflected spectroscopy and other such techniques. It was the first time that you could actually study a meteorite in space or an asteroid in space and then also link up that specific meteorite to a specific asteroid. That's never been done before. And so that's kind of a good analog for a sample return mission in that you would go and study a particular type of asteroid and then take that information in that context

and then look for, say, what we do as far as organic analysis. Those things are really put in combination. So that was really a good test for us. And the fact that it was an observed fall and it was collected pretty quickly, minimized contamination. Well, I hope that someday, before too long, you guys actually have some samples that have been returned from elsewhere,

more samples, I should say, to play with. Just a sort of personal question about you and others at the lab. When you get something like this delivered, something that may have been around quite literally from the earliest days of our solar system, I mean, is there any kind of special excitement or a wonder surrounding that? It's funny that you mention that, because I think every time, at least with me, I know other people in the lab, too.

It's like Christmas, maybe. It's hard to explain the thrill of it, but it never gets old. It never gets old receiving meteorites and analyzing meteorites, I think, because they really are special. They really represent the oldest material in the solar system that we can study. And so every time something comes into the lab, we all get excited. And then I get paranoid because I don't want to contaminate it. Well, I guess that's healthy paranoia. Yeah. So there's a lot of special handling that goes on. But yeah, there's a lot of excitement, especially for this one, too,

because of what you said of how special this meteorite was and the conditions beforehand that we received the meteorite. Most of the time we get meteorites that were picked up in the Antarctic, and we request them for analysis. So the history of the meteorite is not nearly as well known as what was with 2008 PC3, Alamahatacita. Mike, we are out of time. Congratulations to you and the rest of the team there on this great work. Please keep it up. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for having me on your show, and thanks to all the listeners for tuning in. You bet. My pleasure, and hopefully theirs as well. Knowing our audience, I think I can say that pretty confidently.

Michael Callahan is a research physical scientist at the Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory. That's part of the Center for Astrobiology at the Goddard Space Flight Center out there in Maryland, Greenbelt, Maryland. He's been talking to us from his office, I imagine probably down the hall from the lab where that piece of this rather historic meteorite is probably still sitting, I wonder. Is it still down there in the lab? Oh, yes. And we actually have more fragments that we've been analyzing.

But that will be for a future broadcast, perhaps. Okay, we'll do that. And to continue this broadcast, we'll be back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up in just a few seconds. Gosh, will I ever make it back up to the Planetary Society to see the director of projects in person and record What's Up? He's Bruce Betts. Thank goodness for Skype. He's at the other end of the line. Welcome back, guy.

You haven't been there? No, not for weeks. I'm just kidding. We miss you desperately. Well, I'm going to try. I'm going to try for this week, but we'll see. It's just been busy. What can I say?

The sky's been busy too, hasn't it? Yes, the sky has been busy. Things in the sky have been busy. We have Jupiter over low in the west after sunset, but what's getting even spiffier about that coming up here pretty much now and getting better and better is that Mercury is having an evening apparition and coming up also over in the West. You will see it slow in the West throughout March. But if you look on March 15th or any day near that, it's very close to Jupiter. So Jupiter is the super bright star-like object, and Mercury's the bright star-like object.

Hmm. That might be worth getting out the telescope. Ooh, ooh, it would. Go for it. The only challenge is they're both pretty low, so there's a lot of atmosphere. But still, you've got the two hanging out together. So check it out. And Saturn rising in the mid-evening over in the east and still hanging out above Virgo's brightest star, Spica.

And in the pre-dawn, we've got Venus dominating over in the east before dawn, bright star-like object. We move on to this week in space history. In 1969, Apollo 9 astronauts complete the first solo flight of the lunar module. This was the testing out of separating it and flying it and docking it in Earth orbit. In 1977, rings were discovered around Uranus. Do you remember those days when we thought only Saturn had rings? Yeah, I sure do. And now all the giant planets, just nasty with them. And five years ago, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives at Mars. Amazingly, MRO has been doing great successful science for the last five years. Yeah, we were just talking about stuff from Opportunity, and there's another great shot from overhead taken by MRO.

Still keeping track of things down there on the surface. Very impressive. It is indeed. That was a little frightening. We move on to random space fact. Scale model solar systems. I just can't get enough. I'm still not over the last one, okay?

But I'm not going to improve on that. But this one is educational. All right. Nothing anatomical this time. Nothing anatomical. No. Now, if you, if Matt Kaplan is standing not that far from his home on the beach, on the Pacific Ocean of the United States, and 500 meters away is Neptune. That's the scale of the bulk of our solar system.

500 meters away, Neptune. Neptune, remember, of the bulk of our solar system. 500 meters away, Neptune. Neptune, remember, that took Voyager 2 nine years to reach. Then the closest star system, the Alpha Centauri star system- Oh, I'm not going to like this. This is going to be depressing. Go ahead. Would be located on the Atlantic coast of the United States. Actually, even a little bit offshore. We're never going to get there. This is profoundly upsetting to me. Oh, I'm sorry. I really didn't mean it that way.

It's just to reemphasize space is really, really big and really, really empty mostly. All right. All right. I'm sorry. Maybe the trivia contest will cheer you up. I certainly hope so. What did we ask? We asked you in our trivia question, besides Temple 1, what is the only other comet to have been visited by more than one spacecraft? How'd we do, Matt? Well, we did very well. I mean, by which I mean the listeners did very well. It wasn't too tough

to come up with this, I guess, because what is the most famous comet in our solar system? Bob. Bob the comet. No, that's a close second. Halley. Halley. Yes, Halley's comet. There was the fleet of international missions that went to Halley.

Or as several listeners called it, the Halley Armada. That must have really put the fear into the comment, man. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see whether it comes back next time. I think it's coming back with guns next time. Oh, good. Fortunately, it'll be a while. Five missions. Five.

Count them. One, two, three, four, five. Wow. Yes. That was a lot of missions. You'd probably like to know who won. I would. I'm sure they would. And this is proof that we have a burgeoning audience in Poland.

Our winner, first-time winner, whose name I will no doubt mangle, Marcin Zajga. Marcin Zajga in Warsaw came up with that answer. It was Halley's in 1986, surprisingly long ago. And we're going to send Marcin a 2011 year in space calendar. Very nice. And what are we giving away this week, Matt? I thought that maybe we would once again do a Livio Radio Carmen device. This is the really cool device where you can basically take Internet radio along with you.

It's sort of an MP3 recorder, but it makes it really easy to download a podcast onto this device and then plug it into your car cigarette lighter that doesn't light cigarettes anymore and listen at your leisure as you drive down the highway of life. All right, here's the question. What kind of airplane is the shuttle training aircraft? So the one that they practice, you can't just whip out a shuttle and glide it around anytime you want. No.

So the astronauts use an airplane and some various modifications to try to practice in a real aircraft piloting the shuttle. What kind of airplane is that? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You got until the 14th of March to get us that answer. The 14th, that's Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody.

Go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about black and white. Thank you. Good night. Black and white cookies, I hope. See, that's what I think is left to the listener. There are so many things that are black and white. Well, he's Bruce Betts, the monochrome director of projects for the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week here for What's Up, and I could really use a cookie. My sons are thinking Pokemon. Something different next week, as we're joined by folk singer Peter Meyer, who often writes songs about our amazing universe. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова