AMINO ACID ‘DISCOVERED’ ON A COMET

 NASA Astronomers claim to have found an amino acid on a comet. The discovery confirms that some of life’s building blocks were delivered to the early earth from space.

 A team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has analysed the samples from the agency’s Stardust mission and traced the amino acid called glycine to an icy comet for the first time.

STARDUST

Stardust is an American interplanetary mission of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose primary purpose was to investigate the makeup of the comet Wild 2 and its coma. It was launched on February 7, 1999 by NASA, travelled nearly 3 billion miles (5·109 km), and returned to Earth on January 15, 2006 to release a sample material capsule. It is the first sample return mission to collect cosmic dust and return the sample to Earth. On July 3, 2007 a second mission was approved to revisit the comet Tempel 1.