MEIERHENRICH , Uwe J.

Philae is a comet Lander, part of the ESA Rosetta Mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After a ten year cruise through the solar system it successfully landed on the nucleus of the comet on November 12, 2014. Philae's payload consists of ten scientific instruments, including COSAC, an evolved gas analyser with the capability to...

La plus récente mission spatiale cométaire, Rosetta, était équipée d'instruments capables de caractériser les molécules organiques de la comète 67P/Tchourioumov-Guérassimenko avec une précision sans précédent. Les spectromètres de masse ont révélé une grande diversité de molécules organiques et indiquent que 67P contient à la fois des entités...

All life on Earth is characterized by its asymmetry – both the genetic material and proteins are composed of homochiral monomers. Understanding how this molecular asymmetry initially arose is a key question related to the origins of life. Cometary ice simulations, L-enantiomeric enriched amino acids in meteorites and the detection of circularly...

How did life begin? How did the single handedness of the molecular building blocks of the complex trinity – DNA, RNA, and proteins come about? Among all the theories regarding the origin of biomolecular asymmetry, those focusing on asymmetric photochemical processes using circularly polarized light (CPL) in interstellar environments appear to...

Circularly polarized light (CPL) is known to be a true chiral entity capable of generating absolute molecular asymmetry. However, the degree of inducible optical activity depends on the λ of the incident CPL. Exposure of amorphous films of rac-alanine to tunable CPL led to enantiomeric excesses (ee) which not only follow the helicity but also...

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission was launched in March 2004 in order to reach comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by August 2014. The Cometary Sampling and Composition experiment (COSAC) onboard the Rosetta mission's lander "Philae" has been designed for the cometary in situ detection and quantification of organic molecules using gas...

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission was launched in March 2004 in order to reach comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by August 2014. The Cometary Sampling and Composition experiment (COSAC) onboard the Rosetta mission's lander "Philae" has been designed for the cometary in situ detection and quantification of organic molecules using gas...

We detected ribose and related sugars in the organic residues of simulated interstellar ices using multidimensional gas chromatography. Kawai questions the formation of sugar compounds in the ices and suggests that they arise from a classical formose reaction during sample workup for analysis. We disagree with this hypothesis and present...

This folder includes:*Supplementary Material (.pdf)(Materials and Methods, Figs. S1–S6, Table S1, caption for movie S1)Other supplementary materials available for this manuscript: *Movie S1 (.mp4)*GC×GC chromatograms of ice sample and blank recorded with LECO Corp ChromaTOFTM (.peg)

The delivery of organic matter to the primitive Earth via comets and meteorites has long been hypothesized to be an important source for prebiotic compounds such as amino acids or their chemical precursors that contributed to the development of prebiotic chemistry leading, on Earth, to the emergence of life. Photochemistry of...

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