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Constraints for Use of Ultraviolet Spectropolarimetry to Detect Chiral Amino Acids from Comets

Gómez de Castro, Ana I.; De Isidro-Gómez, Ana I.

Life is pervasive on planet Earth, but whether life is ubiquitous in the Galaxy and sustainable over timescales comparable to stellar evolution is unknown. Evidence suggests that life first appeared on Earth more than 3.77 Gyr ago, during a period of heavy meteoric bombardment. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, have been demonstrated t…

COSAC Onboard Rosetta: A Bioastronomy Experiment for the Short-Period Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Roll, Reinhard; Rosenbauer, Helmut; Gösmann, Fred +1 more

The COSAC (Cometary Sampling and Composition Experiment) onboard the Rosetta mission is a combined gas chromatograph (GC)-mass spectrometer (MS). It is situated on Philae, the lander of the mission, which is intended to land on the nucleus of comet 67/PChuryumov- Gerasimenko. The purpose of the experiment is to analyze the volatile fraction of soi…