A SPACE ODDITY

Cosmic 'gum' found is vital for life

- BY DEAN MURRAY

SCIENTISTS have found mysterious 'space gum' vital to creating life in an asteroid sample. Sugars essential for biology were in fragments from the Bennu space rock. NASA's $800million OSIRIS-REx mission collected rocks and dust, called regolith, from its surface in 2020 and carried it 200 million miles to Earth. The substance has not been seen before in astromaterials and is among research presented in three studies published this week in Nature Geoscience and Nature Astronomy.