When NASA launched a spacecraft to an asteroid, scientists patiently waited for their chance to look at bits of the space rock in a laboratory, hoping it would answer some of humanity’s most enduring questions.
For Danny Glavin, a senior sample scientist, he wanted to solve a relentless mystery in his life’s work: Why are all known living things only based on the left-handed forms of amino acids, the molecules that build proteins?
His moment arrived nearly a decade later. Glavin and a team of researchers probed the grit from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid made of loosely bound boulders, but what they found threw them a curveball. Rather than supporting one of the leading hypotheses — that the early solar system favored the left-handed variety and brought those ingredients to primitive Earth — it showed no favoritism at all.
“I have to admit, I was a little disillusioned or disappointed,” Glavin said. “I felt like this invalidated 20 years of research in our lab and my career.”
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