The homogeneity found among both is especially confounding to scientists because the left and right-handed versions of all ...

All life on Earth relies on a standard set of 20 amino acids to build the proteins that carry out life's essential actions. A new study looks at whether life could evolve on Earth or in space with ...

More asteroids could have made life's ingredients Date: January 19, 2011 Source: NASA Summary: A wider range of asteroids were capable of creating the kind of amino acids used by life on Earth ...

The team analyzed seven samples taken during the Apollo missions and stored in a NASA curation facility since return to Earth, and found amino acids in all of them at very low concentrations (105 ...

Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, “you can’t mix them,” says Dr. Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard, co-author of the study.

NASA's Stardust probe successfully collected Amino Acids from the comet's tail, confirmed to originate in space.

Over 40 years later, a team of NASA-funded scientists has identified that most of those amino acids were due to contamination from Earth. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins.

In October, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will collect a sample of asteroid Bennu and return a sealed sample of dirt and rocks back to Earth. Researchers will look for amino acids in that sample too.

The acids that NASA studied were almost all left sided, which means they most likely came from Earth. That doesn't entirely rule out meteorites as a source, ...

image: A diagram of left-handed and right-handed versions of the amino acid isovaline, found in the Murchison meteorite. view more . Credit: NASA. The mystery of why life uses molecules with ...

The amino acid team, ... NASA assigned the Stardust spacecraft to another mission, called Stardust NExT, to sample a comet called Tempel-1. Comets aren't identical dirty snowballs, ...