30 May 2016 – Over the weekend a headline caught my eye on the European Space Agency website: “Rosetta’s Comet contains ingredients for life”.
The amino acid glycine, one of the key building blocks of life, has been found in the “fuzzy atmosphere” of comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency announced. The findings mean it is likely the glycine was carried through space on the surface of the comet.
But this is the real mind-blower:
“The confirmation supports the idea that amino acids are common around star-forming regions of the universe and were likely delivered to Earth by a comet or other celestial object”.
Yes, we are truly stardust. It sounds like a line from a poem, but there is some solid science behind this statement too: almost every element on Earth was formed at the heart of a star. Next time you’re out gazing at stars twinkling in the night sky, spare a thought for the tumultuous reactions they play host to. It’s easy to forget that stars owe their light to the energy released by nuclear fusion reactions at their cores. These are the very same reactions which created chemical elements like carbon or iron – the building blocks which make up the world around us.
After the Big Bang, tiny particles bound together to form hydrogen and helium. As time went on, young stars formed when clouds of gas and dust gathered under the effect of gravity, heating up as they became denser. At the stars’ cores, bathed in temperatures of over 10 million degrees C, hydrogen and then helium nuclei fused to form heavier elements. A reaction known as nucleosynthesis.
This reaction continues in stars today as lighter elements are converted into heavier ones. Relatively young stars like our Sun convert hydrogen to produce helium, just like the first stars of our universe. Once they run out of hydrogen, they begin to transform helium into beryllium and carbon. As these heavier nuclei are produced, they too are burnt inside stars to synthesize heavier and heavier elements. Different sized stars play host to different fusion reactions, eventually forming everything from oxygen to iron.
During a supernova, when a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the resulting high energy environment enables the creation of some of the heaviest elements including iron and nickel. The explosion also disperses the different elements across the universe, scattering the stardust which now makes up planets including Earth.
The ESA’s Rosetta mission has been a passion of mine over the years. Its Philae probe landed on a comet, the first time in history that such an extraordinary feat has been achieved, back in November 2014. Through the invitation of an ESA staffer, I was able to follow the landing live.
It was stunning from a pure technology standpoint. After more than 10 years travelling through space … it launched on 2 March 2004 and traveled 6.4 billion kilometres through the Solar System before arriving at the comet … using technology that is now 25-years old. The comet was travelling at up to 84,000 mph and more than 300 million miles away from Earth. Philae’s landing was famously rocky: it bounced several times before landing, on its side, in the shade.
Yes, 25 year old technology. Not 10 year old technology. Ancient technology that had been built 15 years before it landed.
It is because the team — involving over 300 scientists and technology personnel across 5 countries … had to evaluate every potential problem of a mission expected to last 10 years, anticipating the fixes and builds ahead of time. It had to test, and retest, and retest … and retest again. Once something was in space, it is difficult to change. The truth is that conducting research in the harsh and remote realm of space is a staggeringly difficult task, and every successful test mission by the ESA is the result of the sweat and ingenuity of thousands of engineers, scientists, and support personnel who designed and built the tools to make it possible. Even today the job is a demanding one as they stretch to design more capable satellites and take on more challenging missions.
Hat tip to the Imperial College (London) Space and Atmospheric Physics Group and Space Lab team for the extraordinary time (and patience) you spent with me at the recent Imperial Festival 2016 to walk me through the technology.
But can you imagine the truly Herculean task the ESA was facing with the rocket and spacecraft technology it knew at the time, and only surmising the environment in which these tools would have to operate? Ten years into the future? They were not positive what materials would work best, or best assembled to do the job, or what obstacles the tools would have to overcome.
But damn it … they did it.
And speaking of old technology, one of my posts last week:
U.S military still uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear forces. But I have good news!!