The scientific value of the Aguas Zarcas meteorite

 

When I saw this article, I remembered reading about the fall of this meteorite. But even as the labs were gearing up to study it, the excitement of the fall over Costa Rica was fading.

Scientifically, though, it stayed really exciting.

An unusual meteorite, more valuable than gold, may hold the building blocks of life

And it's pretty, too.

"The Field Museum team has also been combing through Aguas Zarcas for the calcium-and aluminum-rich inclusions, the earliest minerals to condense out of the protosolar disk. Drifting around the disk, they gathered a record of the young Sun’s unruly outbursts, as surges of particle radiation left telltale signatures of helium and neon in each grain. “They are like flight recorders,” Heck says. “We can just count those elements that form and learn about the activity of the Sun.” 

Several other teams are going after the meteorite’s complex organic compounds. They formed millions of years later, as basic carbon molecules reacted in the warm, wet interior of Aguas Zarcas’s parent asteroid. Some of the products of that early chemistry are volatiles—compounds, frozen in pockets when the meteorite floated in cold space, that are unstable at room temperature on Earth and escape with their telltale smells. Using electronic “noses” designed for the purpose, researchers at Brown University and ASU are hoping to capture the fleeting chemicals before they fade.

Other carbon compounds are sturdier. At NASA Goddard, for example, Glavin’s team ground up bits of Aguas Zarcas with a mortar and pestle, mixed them in pure water, heated the mixture to almost boiling, and, using a mass spectrometer, analyzed the compounds rising off.

The process spat out a graph crowded with unknown organic molecules of different weights. “It’s like, oh my God, there’s likely hundreds of different amino acids in this meteorite,” Glavin says. “Murchison, for 50 years, has been the gold standard. Aguas is comparable.” The team is now working on a lower temperature technique to hunt for peptides: multiple amino acids bound together. If found, they would illustrate another level of prebiological space chemistry, suspected but never seen."

We've just heard the beginning of this scientific quest, I think.