Aliens are useless. Microorganisms were found on a rare sample of an asteroid

The Hayabusa2 mission of the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) collected 5.4 grams ((about a teaspoon) of rocks, pebbles and dust from asteroid Ryugu when it was nearly 320 million kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft dropped samples to Earth in 2020. They were sealed in a capsule that made a soft landing in the outback of South Australia.

The capsule was then transported to a facility in Japan built specifically to house asteroid samples. The capsule was opened in a vacuum chamber, later sent to a pressurized chamber with a constant flow of nitrogen, which should prevent terrestrial contamination. Eventually, the sample pieces were placed in containers filled with nitrogen and sent to researchers around the world for analysis.

Ryugu belongs to a group of carbonaceous asteroids that are considered the building blocks of the Solar System. By analyzing these asteroids in the laboratory, scientists could better understand how the Solar System formed and how life on Earth later appeared. But so far it does not seem possible.

A team of researchers from Imperial College London, after scanning a sample of the asteroid, discovered rods and threads of organic matter that were interpreted as thin filamentous microorganisms. The researchers determined that the microbial life in the samples arose from pollution on Earth and did not have an extraterrestrial origin, they said in their findings published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The discovery suggests that existing protocols to avoid bacterial contamination are insufficient.