It's difficult for Dante Lauretta to describe what he's hoping to find on asteroid 1999 RQ36. But there's a good reason for that.
"We don't exactly know what we'll find until we get there," he says. "But we're looking for really carbon-rich viable material that normally doesn't survive passage to the surface of the Earth on a meteorite. We're looking for things that humans haven't ever seen."
Lauretta is the deputy principal investigator for NASA's recently announced OSIRIS-REx mission. It's an appropriately cinematic name for what he and his colleagues are trying to do. Namely, they're hoping to find the origins of life on Earth in space.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "OMG, panspermia!" And you're wrong. That's not really the right way to describe the concept Lauretta and principal investigator, Michael J. Drake, are trying to prove.
The theory of panspermia is about life that already exists—tiny bacteria that travel through the cosmos and then plummet to Earth on a falling star. It hypothesizes that organisms could survive in the cold reaches of space and accidentally immigrate to our planet, where they become Life As We Know It. When you think about panspermia and talk about "the origins of life on Earth," the emphasis is on the "Earth." For research on that, you want the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment.
OSIRIS-REx, on the other hand, is about the origins of life, which happens to be, from our perspective, on Earth.
It's a mandate that feels, at once, a little disappointing ("So, what, no aliens then?") and astoundingly ambitious. OSIRIS-REx is trying to answer the questions that panspermia just sort of shrugs at. How did life form? What prompted organic molecules to stick together, form chains, and become the proteins that build everything from us, to plants, to tiny bacteria? Drake and Lauretta have a theory for that, and they think they'll find evidence to support it on asteroid RQ36.
Read More: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/09/nasa-osiris-looking.html
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