ASTRONOMERS are calling for a mission to re-investigate a 30-year-old mystery, hoping to gain a new insight into the origin of life on Earth.
Measurements of sunlight reflected from Mercury鈥檚 surface have shown that the majority of minerals on the planet all twist light the same way. Minerals such as quartz can exist in left and right 鈥渉anded鈥� forms, and these mirror-image versions are usually found in roughly equal quantities.
But Mercury has an over-abundance of left-handers and no one knows why. Some biologists think such minerals could have acted as a template for early life, explaining why Earth鈥檚 organic molecules tend to be left-handed too.
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鈥淭his is one of the forgotten mysteries in astronomy,鈥� says Uwe Meierhenrich of Bremen University in Germany. At last week鈥檚 Second European Workshop on Astrobiology in Graz, Austria, he proposed building an instrument for ESA鈥檚 BepiColombo mission to Mercury, due to launch in 2009 or 2010, to get more clues about how and why the minerals line up that way.