Cosmochemistry can tell us about the delivery of the ingredients necessary for life to planets or moons via asteroids or comets,” Dr. Ogliore tells Universe Today. “Since we have both asteroid and comet material in the lab, we can tell if primitive pre-biotic organic compounds may have been delivered by these bodies.
Of course, this doesn’t mean life on Earth (or elsewhere) started this way, only that it is one pathway. Detection of life on another world would be one of the biggest discoveries in the history of science. So of course we’d want to be absolutely sure! This requires repeated measurements by different labs using different techniques, which requires a sample on Earth. I think the only way we’d know for sure if there was life on Europa, Enceladus, or Mars is if we bring a sample back to Earth from these places.”
In my opinion the most important single measurement in the history of cosmochemistry was the measurements of the oxygen isotopic composition of the Sun,” Dr. Ogliore tells Universe Today. “To do this, we needed to return samples of the solar wind to Earth, which we did with NASA’s Genesis mission. However, the sample return capsule crashed on Earth. But did that stop the cosmochemists?! Hell no! Kevin McKeegan and colleagues at UCLA had built a specialized, enormous, complicated instrument to study these samples. Despite the crash, McKeegan and colleagues analyzed oxygen in the solar wind and found that it was 6% lighter than oxygen found on Earth, and it matched the composition of the oldest known objects in the Solar System: millimeter-sized calcium-aluminum inclusions (CAIs) found in meteorites.”
All things considered, cosmochemistry is both an enormously challenging and rewarding field of study to try and answer some of the most difficult and longstanding questions regarding the processes responsible for the existence of celestial bodies in the Solar System and beyond, including stars, planets, moons, meteorites, and comets, along with how life emerged on our small, blue world. As noted, cosmochemistry perfectly sums up Carl Sagan’s famous quote, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” It is through cosmochemistry and the analysis of meteorites and other returned samples that enable researchers to slowly inch our way to answering what makes life and where we can find it.
Cosmochemistry is the study of space stuff, the actual materials that make up planets, stars, satellites, comets, and asteroids. The materials record the conditions at the time and place where they formed, allowing us to look into the deep past. Only four nations have successfully used robotic explorers to collect samples from another planetary body and returned them to Earth
Cosmochemistry
Cosmochemistry – the isotopic and chemical history of the solar system deduced from meteorites and lunar samples
Cosmochemistry has made tremendous progress since the 1960s, largely because of improvements in analytical technology. The Apollo program to bring back samples of the Moon was initially driven by competition with the Soviet Union, but the large investment in laboratories to analyze the returned sample provided a critical boost to cosmochemistry in the late 1960s. The development of analytical instrumentation capable of extreme isotopic precision (thermal ionization and gas source mass spectrometry), precise microbeamchemical analysis (electron probe microanalysis), and sensitive trace-element analysis (neutron activation analysis) at that time, coupled with the serendipitous falls of the primitive carbonaceous chondritesAllende and Murchison in 1969, led to considerable growth in our knowledge of the early solar system.
The geochemistry and cosmochemistry of impacts (i.e., of impact craters and impact processes) is a rapidly developing research area that encompasses such wide-ranging topics as the simple chemical characterization of the various rock types involved (target rocks, impact breccias, melt rocks, etc.), the identification of extraterrestrial components in impact ejecta, the determination of the impactor (projectile) composition, and the determination of the causes of environmental changes from chemolithostratigraphic analyses.
This chapter is divided into three general areas. At the beginning, to set the stage and to introduce the relevant background information and terminology, a brief introduction to impact craters and processes is provided. Then, the main geochemical methods employed in the study of impact craters and processes are described. Finally, a number of examples are given in which geochemical methods in the study of impacts were used. An extensive reference list, intended to expand the usefulness of this chapter, is included. Parts of this chapter are updated from sections in Koeberl (1998) and Montanari and Koeberl (2000). It should be noted that this chapter is almost exclusively concerned with the study of terrestrial impacts (with the exception of a few lunar examples), mainly due to accessibility of rocks for study.
Sample return of primitive matter from the outer Solar System
The last 30 years of cosmochemistry and planetary science have shown that one major Solar System reservoir is vastly undersampled in the available suite of extraterrestrial materials, namely small bodies that formed in the outer Solar System (>10 au). Because various dynamical evolutionary processes have modified their initial orbits (e.g., giant planet migration, resonances), these objects can be found today across the entire Solar System as P/D near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, Jupiter and Neptune Trojans, comets, Centaurs, and small (diameter <200 km) TNOs. This reservoir is of tremendous interest, as it is recognized as the least processed since the dawn of the Solar System and thus the closest to the starting materials from which the Solar System formed. This is underlined by the extremely interesting results obtained by in situ studies of isotopic compositions of matter from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by ESA’s Rosetta mission (see Hoppe et al., 2018 for a review), and from laboratory studies of anhydrous chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles (CP-IDPs) (Ishii et al., 2008), ultracarbonaceous Antarctic micrometeorites(UCCAMs) (Duprat et al., 2010), and matter from comet 81P/Wild 2 returned to Earth in 2006 by NASA’s Stardust mission (Brownlee et al., 2006).
The next major breakthroughs in planetary science will come from studying outer Solar System samples in the laboratory, but this can only be achieved by an L-class mission that directly collects and returns to Earth materials from this reservoir. The proposed strategy consists in (1) a direct trajectory to the rendezvous target, (2) a reconnaissance of the terrain with an orbiter payload including at least an optical camera, a near-infrared spectrometer and a thermal infrared camera, (3) collection of surface/subsurface samples (at least two locations) that are volatile and dust rich, and (4) return of the samples to the Earth. The reentry capsule must be able to preserve the samples at cryogenic temperature. The selected target should be as primitive as possible which might exclude near-Earth objects from the candidate list. Comets and P/D main belt asteroids including main belt comets would then appear as the most accessible and scientifically valuable targets, with comets being the preferred targets because of their activity that can be used to characterize the volatiles and also because their surface should be more “primitive” (Vernazza et al. 2021b)
The search for life beyond earth:: that commenced with the ancient Greeks, dating back at least as early as 400 BC, a very long time before science fiction emerged. But until today as we gaze up at the night sky and marvel at the landmarks of the universe, it is still hard not to wonder: are we alone in the universe or is there life out there? The question of whether we are alone in the universe is one that may never be fully answered, but the search for the answer will continue for generations to come.
The mystery around imagined extraterrestrial life has waxed and waned over decades, stirring provocative and useful thinking amongst scientists and the public alike. Nearly every single one of us has imagined extraterrestrial beings to be bizarre and somewhat human-like. In fact, they are always depicted as such in books and movies. But, while extraterrestrial life searching has evolved from fantasy to advanced space imaging, there is still much we must learn before extraterrestrial life could be confirmed. Today, with rapid advances in technology and space exploration, the search for extraterrestrial life has become more pressing than ever before. This transition rested in part on the discovery of exoplanets – planets that orbit stars outside of our own solar system – and over the past few decades, astronomers have identified a thousand of them. Some of these are located in the habitable zone around their star – the region where conditions are just right for liquid water to exist. Water is considered a crucial ingredient for the development of life, and so the discovery of habitable exoplanets has led to the tantalising possibility that life could exist beyond our own planet.
Our understanding of life is restricted to the observable and quantifiable processes that take place on Earth. However, under the premise that extraterrestrial beings share fundamental principles of physicochemical parameters as living organisms on Earth, scientists search for biosignatures – molecules that are generated during biological processes. These could include oxygen and methane in a planet’s atmosphere. The search for biosignatures is not only crucial to determine the likelihood of microbial organisms on other cosmic bodies, but also to find evidence of extinct life. But while the detection of biosignatures is still a challenging task, recent advances in technology such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have made it more feasible than ever before.
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