The Vatican helps NASA

The church has always had astronomers at its service, the Vatican observatory has its origins in the 17th century, currently it is based in Castel Gandolfo Italy and operates a telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory in the United States, what is news now is that NASA has requested the collaboration of one of the Vatican experts to build a special device to analyze the density and porosity of the samples brought back from the asteroid Bennu.

This device is not something new, it is called a pycnometer, it is used to know the density or specific weight of a material at a specific temperature and there are companies that have been manufacturing it for a long time, but NASA needed a custom one, one that is very precise and calibrated. for materials of extraterrestrial origin.

And this is where Jesuit brother Robert Macke comes into play, who in addition to being religious, is a scientist who is an expert on the subject and capable of building the device that NASA is looking for and will also do it for free, in a selfless manner, having said that his work is He does it by vocation.

With the tools ready, what NASA will tell us on the 11th, we have some references because this is not the first time that samples of an asteroid have been brought. The Japanese have already done it twice, so I can tell you first of all that what we What NASA will tell will be a very basic view of what the samples contain, since the studies can take months or years.

We have an example in the Japanese Hayabusa 2 probe that arrived at the Ryugu asteroid in 2018 and managed to bring about 5.4 grams of material from the asteroid to Earth on December 5, 2020, but it was years later in March 2023 when they were obtained. some really surprising results, for example, the chemical analysis of the material found that there was a sample of uracil which is an organic molecule is one of the five basic elements that make up the RNA of all living beings, this finding is proof in favor of the theory that at least some of the elements essential for life had to come inside asteroids and comets.

Researchers believe that certain complex molecules could only be formed in space in a very cold environment, farther from the Sun than the Earth is, in a place where asteroids and comets were loaded with ice, ice in plural Because they were different materials. frozen, scientists believe that at some point these ices were bombarded with intense cosmic rays that broke down with their energy the simple molecules trapped inside the ice and produced a reconfiguration creating more complex molecules then those complex molecules trapped inside asteroids and comets. They ended up arriving on Earth, which is located in a warmer area of the solar system, and when they fell into the primitive oceans, those molecules ended up forming part, along with other elements that were already on Earth, of the primordial soup from which life emerged.

The Japanese had found one of those essential elements for life that NASA will find now that it has a sample 46 times larger than that of the Japanese.

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