UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — José Aponte, an astrochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will discuss the abundance and molecular distribution of amino acids, and other biologically relevant molecules extracted from meteorites, in a talk titled "Organic Astrochemistry 101: Meteorites, Origins of Life, and Sample-Return Missions" at 4 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 30. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place in 112 Walker Building on Penn State's University Park campus.

Carbon-rich meteorites represent some the oldest and most primitive pieces of material formed in the solar system. These meteorites could even be older than the Sun itself and may have delivered an important concentration of organic compounds and water to the primitive Earth. Multiple organic classes, including those required for life such as amino acids, carboxylic acids, nucleobases and polyols, have been identified from these carbon-rich meteorites. These organic classes have provided valuable insights into the chemical inventory of the early solar system, the primordial synthesis of organic matter and the question of how life appeared on Earth. 

Aponte’s talk is part of the Penn State Earth and Environmental Systems Institute's spring 2023 EarthTalks speaker series, “Exploration of our Solar System.” We now live in the golden age of solar system exploration. With a dozen NASA missions currently in development — as well as spacecraft actively on Mars, near Jupiter, and in the Kuiper belt — the current scale of mission activity is unprecedented and brings forth a new era of comparative study of varied worlds at the systems level. The series is intended to provide a venue for the expansion of participant’s horizons into our solar system.

Talks also are available via Zoom. For more information about the spring 2023 series, visit the EarthTalks webpage.