I wasn't sure if you had seen this one or the post had passed me by.

Over a century ago a rock fell from the heavens and plopped down near the rural French village of Orgueil. Little did these villagers realize that 136 years later this space rock would suggest to a few guys in a southern California surf town how life may have started on Earth

The Scripps team found that Orgueil housed a relatively simple mixture of amino acids, consisting primarily of glycine and alanine. To make sure these amino acids weren’t Johnny-come-latelys that hopped on the space rock once it arrived, Bada analyzed the sample’s carbon isotope concentration and found that indeed the amino acids were of cosmic origin.

Bada then compared the Orgueil samples with material from three other notable and well-studied meteorites: Murchison, Murray, and Ivuna, a space rock that fell in Tanzania, Africa, in 1938.

The research team soon discovered that the meteorites could be broken down into two distinct categories. The Murchison and Murray meteorites contained a complex mix of more than 70 types of amino acids. The Orgueil and Ivuna specimens contained a much simpler composition, only two amino acids.

Bada thinks the amino acid mixture found in the latter two meteorites were formed from compounds such as hydrogen cyanide, which have been recently observed in high concentrations within the comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake.

Full article at Astronomy.com, Comets: Vehicles of Life?

Pdf. paper published in February 27, 2001 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Marcia