Life seeded from Space? Rowan’s Connolly oversees research that seems to confirm theory

Scientists have long surmised that the seeds of life on Earth may have originated in space.

New research overseen by a Rowan University professor may help support that theory.

Harold C. Connolly Jr., founding chair and professor of Geology in the School of Earth & Environment, oversees the sample analysis phase of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission, which in 2023 delivered material from the asteroid Bennu to Earth. Research from that historic quest is producing monumental results, including articles published Jan. 29 in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy.

Connolly said those and other studies indicate that the sample from Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid with an orbit similar to Earth’s, holds clues to the origin of the solar system as well as to the source of water and organic molecules – the “building blocks of life” – on Earth.

“These are the first major papers from the analysis phase to be published in high-profile journals,” said Connolly, the OSIRIS-REx mission sample scientist. “One of the most important questions we ask is regarding the origin of life. We need to know how the compounds from which life evolved were formed and how they were delivered to Earth.”

Scientists have long hypothesized that those compounds arrived in meteorites after originating on distant, ancient bodies, like the one from which Bennu descended. NASA sought a pristine sample from an asteroid because meteorites degrade when they breach the atmosphere and land on Earth.

In 2020, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully completed a trip to the asteroid Ryugu, returning with a sample. Connolly, who worked on that mission as well, said the sample delivered by the craft Hayabusa2 likewise teased the possibility that the seeds for life on Earth might have originated in space.

Still, he emphasized that the latest findings are not about life per se coming from space but “the materials from which life formed, the building blocks and the carrier of those building blocks.”

Seeking the origins of life

“Asteroids are the building blocks of planets, and they carry the building blocks of life,” Connolly said. “We’ve had pieces of the puzzle in the past, but after analyzing these samples from Bennu, we have additional pieces.”

As mission sample scientist, Connolly oversees work by the entire OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team, which includes some 260 researchers from more than 40 institutions around the world.

Launched Sept. 8, 2016, OSIRIS-REx traveled to near-Earth asteroid Bennu and collected a sample of rocks and dust from the surface. The first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, the craft completed a seven-year journey of billions of miles when it delivered its sample to the Utah desert Sept. 24, 2023.

Like the new findings in the Nature journals, the first OSIRIS-REx paper since the sample’s return, which was published last June in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science and co-lead authored by Connolly, also suggested that Bennu contains some of the elements necessary for life.

He said 70 percent of the ~122 grams of material collected from the asteroid has been set aside for study by future generations of scientists. The Bennu sample is the largest ever captured in space and brought back to Earth from a body beyond the Moon.

Lead researchers for the Jan. 29 papers include Tim McCoy, Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Washington, D.C.; Sara Russell, Natural History Museum, London, U.K.; and Danny Glavin and Jason Dworkin, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Of the two new research studies, the paper led by McCoy and Russell — featured on the cover of Nature — describes minerals known as evaporites, or salts, discovered in the sample, while the paper published in Nature Astronomy, led by Glavin and Dworkin, focused on organic compounds in the material, including protein-building amino acids and the nucleobases that encode genetic information in RNA and DNA — what scientists call the building blocks of life. They also found relatively high amounts of ammonia, an inorganic chemical compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, which is significant because on Earth ammonia is a catalyst of biological reactions and a fertilizer that promotes plant growth. A key finding shared with these papers is the linking of the organic components of Bennu to that of a suite of salts.

Excitement surrounding these findings cannot be overstated: remnants of an environment from 4.5 billion years ago could have led to a lush and fertile Earth, supporting the theory that asteroids like Bennu were among the vehicles that brought water and the chemical origins of life.  

In fact, NASA reported, “these ingredients for life could be widespread across the solar system.”

In addition to his work with NASA and Rowan, Connolly is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and an affiliate at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona.

Read the official NASA release.