Murchison Meteorite Still Contentious

An anonymous reader writes "The well-known 1969 meteorite that fell 60 miles north of Melbourne, Australia, remains remarkably contentious today. The 100 kilogram carbon rock : a) contains pre-biotic proteins and 12% water; b) harbors 50 amino acids not found on Earth; c) favors the tell-tale signature of biochemistry based on a dominant left-handed chirality, compared to random or racemic mixtures found in test-tube syntheses. While terrestrial contamination (even interior to the meteor) may discount this so-called 'Murchison meteor', its light isotopes of carbon and nitrogen suggest the left-handed amino acids not found elsewhere on Earth have the same ratios as the right-handed ones. This would not be the case if, say, bacteria was just making the left-handed ones after impact. Seems quite a controversy from down-under."

Comments

Re:reason why not

[davebo]

here's a couple of reasons I can think off the top of my head:

1) we've got to get the ship someplace where there are "space rocks". a low-earth orbit really isn't going to accomplish that - you'd have to go to the asteroid belt for a ready supply. that's not easy. or, conversly, you land someplace where rocks may have accumulated (ie, the moon, mars).

2) if you send a ship to a place with lots of space rocks, the ship is going to get hit by a lot of space rocks. shielding becomes a problem.

3) if you land some place, you're stuck getting rocks next to where you land (like viking) or you've got to build a way to move around (like pathfinder)

4) building a reliable, completely automated assay for amino acids is not trivial. if it's mobile, that's going to be even less trivial.