New findings reveal that a NASA mission traveled to an asteroid that may have once been covered in salty lakes containing organic molecules.
In 2014, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA launched the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to visit asteroid Ryugu. It arrived at the asteroid in June 2018 and studied it from orbit for over a year.
New research identifies a process that might have been key in producing the first organic molecules on Earth about 4 billion years ago, before the origin of life. The process may also have relevance to the life elsewhere in the universe.
A new study by an international team of astronomers has discovered the presence of organic molecules in the disk of a young star V883 Ori, located about 1300 light-years away from the Earth.
