Samples of 'alien' asteroid Ryugu are crawling with life — from Earth
Scientists have found microorganisms crawling over a sample retrieved from the 200 million-mile-distant asteroid Ryugu. But they almost certainly came from Earth.
A rock retrieved from a near-Earth asteroid is crawling with microbial life, scientists have discovered. But the bacteria on its surface almost certainly came from Earth.
The sample is part of a 0.2-ounce (5.4 grams) chunk of rock that Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft scraped from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu and brought back to our planet in 2020.
After the spacecraft landed back on Earth, researchers opened the rock in a vacuum room located inside a clean room to prevent contamination, before storing it in a room flooded with pressurized nitrogen. Then, samples were placed inside nitrogen-filled canisters to be shipped around the world for analysis.
But it seems that somewhere along the way, for one sample of this rock, these preventative measures were not enough. The scientists behind a new study found that one sample, which was embedded in a resin at Imperial College London in the U.K., had filamentous microorganisms, closely matching terrestrial prokaryotic bacteria, crisscrossing its surface. They published their findings Nov. 13 in the journal Meteorics and Planetary Science.
