February 10, 2025

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Speaker: Angel Mojarro, Postdoctoral Researcher, NASA Goddard

Host: Romy Hanna

Title: Organic Matter in the Solar System: Insights from Bennu Sample Analysis

Abstract: A longstanding question regarding the formation and evolution of the solar system concerns the potential sources and diversity of complex organic compounds that may have contributed to the origins of life on the early Earth and perhaps elsewhere. One possibility is that exogenous delivery of organics synthesized within the early solar nebula may represent the most significant source of prebiotically relevant materials (e.g., amino acids, sugars, nucleobases). Therefore, organic-rich asteroids and comets that have persisted with minimal alteration since their accretion may serve as time capsules of the primordial solar system to better understand our planetary and prebiotic origins. This is one of the reasons that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission collected materials from the rare B-type carbonaceous asteroid Bennu, which were delivered to Earth on September 24th, 2023. We anticipate that this will enable an unprecedented study of remarkably ‘pristine’ samples from a well-characterized parent body to unlock the earliest stages of cosmochemistry.

Biography: I am postdoctoral researcher and organic geochemist in the Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My research is focused on biomarker preservation and the origins of life. Specifically, I study how molecular fossils form, how they might persist through time, and the transition from natural chemical networks to modern biological systems. I am currently a collaborator on the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.