Astronomy
The Search for Amino Acids in Cometary Material
Quick fact
NASA's Stardust mission found glycine—the simplest amino acid—in samples from comet Wild 2, and ESA's Rosetta spacecraft later detected glycine in the gas and dust around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Why this is interesting
You might think of comets as dirty snowballs, but they could be carriers of life's essential building blocks. Could the same material that built new homes also constructed the first proteins?