Retired astronaut and current Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) celebrated NASA’s “pretty exciting” announcement Thursday after the agency highlighted how scientists discovered sugars critical to life in samples from near-Earth asteroids.
The discovery of glucose and ribose collected from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft does not show “evidence of life,” but according to NASA, the findings indicate that “the building blocks of biomolecules are widespread throughout the solar system.”
LIFE: Scientists asked people to do one different thing during a walk. The results are shocking.
The space agency noted that deoxyribose (not found in the sample) and ribose are key building blocks of DNA and RNA on Earth.
Yoshihiro Furukawa, a professor at Japan’s Tohoku University who led the research team, said the discovery of ribose means “all the ingredients” to form RNA are present in asteroids.
Kelly in a clip shared Said on social media that the findings raise “larger questions about life in the universe” and underscored the importance of federal funding Scientific research.
“We don’t know for sure if life exists elsewhere, but when you think about the probability, the statistical probability, that it exists, maybe there is life out there,” Kelly said. Kelly recently joked on Stephen Colbert’s Late Night show that America has discovered aliens, but that becomes a problem when they ask to go to our leaders.
Danny Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and co-investigator of the OSIRIS-Rex mission, said in a video that the discovery makes him “even more optimistic” about the search for extraterrestrial life.
“This means that these building blocks for life are distributed from the outer solar system all the way to the inner solar system,” Glavin explained.
“They’re everywhere, everywhere, and that really makes me more optimistic that these are the building blocks that could enable life not just on Earth, but potentially elsewhere — Mars, Europa, the outer solar system.”
Related…
Read the original article on The Huffington Post
