"Earlier this year, researchers found those samples contained the building blocks for life, including amino acids and nucleobases (which form DNA, among other molecules). That's not unusual for an asteroid, but what was unexpected was the form those molecules took: roughly half of them being a perfect inverse - a mirror image - of the way those building blocks appear on Earth."
"Only a few months prior, toward the end of 2024, a team of Nobel-winning biologists and experts - in a paper published in Nature - had raised the alarm on a potential new threat to all living things on Earth. They warned of the potential creation of "mirror life." While the naturally occurring mirror molecules hitching a ride on nearby asteroids are not going to have any impact on our home planet,"
A 2020 blast ejected debris from asteroid Bennu about 200 million miles from Earth. NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex collected the dust and returned samples to Earth, marking the first U.S. asteroid retrieval. Returned samples contained amino acids and nucleobases, key molecular building blocks for life. Roughly half of those molecules were mirror-image forms opposite to terrestrial biological chirality. In late 2024 a team of Nobel-winning biologists warned about the potential creation of mirror life. Naturally occurring mirror molecules in asteroids pose no direct threat to Earth, but concern centers on the possibility of labs synthesizing entire mirror-image organisms that could be hazardous. Biomolecules have handedness; terrestrial DNA is universally right-handed.
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