The Story of the Murchison Meteorite
High up on Mars, digging patiently away while sending streams of data back to Earth is the Phoenix, with avid NASA scientists at this end monitoring every little scoop of dirt being ran through its sifting screen to see if water and possible life forms exist on the red planet.
Meanwhile, here on Earth another story is being discovered, a 1969 story that began in Victoria, Australia near the town of Murchison when a meteorite from space hit the ground. When the meteorite had fallen more than 100 kilograms of rock were collected—the largest carbonaceous chondrite sample ever recovered. Since then, the samples have been analyzed and studied over and over again, with evidence of it containing amino acids and nucleobases—the amino acids being the building blocks of proteins and the nucleobases the subunits from which the nuclei acids are formed, such as DNA. But at that time, no proof was found that the building blocks of life came from space—until now.
Zita Martins from the Imperial College of London and colleagues has found evidence that the Murchison meteorite samples were extraterrestrial. The evidence was obtained from one ring (pyramidines) and two-ring (purines) combines that have nitrogen atoms. It was from this that Martins and colleagues analyzing the percentage of carbon-13 isotape within. This is an important find, in order to look at how life may have evolved on Earth with evidence showing us that the nucleobases never formed “easily” in the conditions of early Earth. This has raised many questions about where life come from, looking at Earth 4 billion years ago when it was bombarded by a billion tons of carbonaceous chondrite meteorite.
Involved in DNA, in addition to RNA, parts t Dr. Z. Martin’s research interests involve meteorites and extraterrestrial organic matter, astrobiology, and detection of organic matter in space missions—such as the ExoMars Mission. She is known for the research of soluble organic content of carbonaceous meteorites and organic compounds detection methods for the Urey instrument—and was short-listed to fly to mars on ESA’s ExoMars mission. She also was supervisor of a PhD student at Imperial College London, 2007-2010, supervisor of undergraduate and MSc students at the Leiden University, The Netherlands, 2003-2005.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
