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Aug 18, 2009 | 5
A NASA probe that ferried material from a comet to Earth appears to have brought back an amino acid from that encounter, bolstering a theory that life's precursors may have arrived on our planet from outer space.
The Stardust spacecraft, launched in 1999, passed through Comet Wild 2 in 2004, soaking up particulates and gas with a unique, lightweight capture material known as aerogel. The sample-return portion of the spacecraft dropped safely to Earth during a flyby of our planet two years later.
Early analysis of the samples revealed the presence of biological building blocks such as amino acids, but terrestrial contamination remained a possible explanation for their occurrence.
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