Dust from the great beyond

Interstellar grains seen by the Cassini spacecraft lend support to the old panspermia hypothesis.
By Dirk Schulze-Makuch
April 21, 2016

After analyzing ten years of data from the Cassini spacecraft that’s been orbiting Saturn since 2004, a team of scientists led by Nicolas Altobelli of the European Space Agency in Madrid, Spain, reports finding dust that came from outside our solar system. Along with millions of ice-rich dust particles shed by Saturn’s moons, Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer detected a grand total of 36 grains that the scientists could trace back to the local interstellar cloud. That cloud is an almost empty bubble of gas through which our solar system is currently moving.
The small interstellar dust grains were zipping past Saturn at speeds of over 72,000 kilometers per hour (44,000 mph), which explains how they avoided becoming gravitationally trapped by the sun. This marks the first time scientists have been able to analyze material from outside our solar system. Intriguingly, the Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer saw the same kind of chemical and mineralogical make-up in the interstellar grains as it did in the local dust.
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Louis Babcock of The Inquisitr on Panspermia, April 9, 2016

The Inquisitr
RNA Space: Building Block Of Life May Be Abundant In Space, Is The Panspermia Theory True?
-Louis Babcock

RNA, ribonucleic acid, is one of three molecules essential in the formation of life. Without RNA, no life on Earth could exist. One of the questions that have baffled scientists is how life started on Earth. Was it a spontaneous process that just happened by luck? Are the building blocks of life abundant in space as the panspermia theory suggests and the molecules necessary for life to develop were “seeded” here? Scientists may have answered this question.

An experiment performed by Cornelia Meinert, an associate scientist at the University Nice Sophia Antipolis, showed that ribose, the sugar in RNA, can be found in comets. In her experiment, Meinert created a simulated comet based on data gathered from the Rosetta mission. The composition of the comet was completely accurate. The comet was then hit with simulated radiation that would have been similar to the radiation that would have been given off by the Sun from millions of years ago. When the experiment was finished, Meinert discovered organic molecules were left over. From the organic molecules, RNA and other essential molecules for life were identified. The other molecules discovered were amino acids, carboxylic acids, and alcohols.

Read the rest at The Inquisitr