Harold Connolly Jr.

And the landscape certainly is such that you know fluid was moving around water.

Yeah, the sedimentary rock deposits.

Oh, I know it.

Yeah.

So I'm not sure if life was actually part of that process, but I'm not going to eliminate it as a scientist from that process.

It could be what we call abiotic or not requiring life.

But it may be that life was there.

There are other evidence to suggest that that.

and I don't know the details of the organic compounds, they're simple organic compounds that were also found there, that may indicate that life was there, but as we know from working with Bennu, we're beginning to understand that the organic compounds that we're finding in Bennu are much greater than what we see in the meteorites and the process which formed them most likely occurred inside of a great parent body or on

on surface or subsurface of Mars, for example, or Earth.

And that is an important punctuation point that we have to know.

Meteorites are definitely contaminated.

So we're learning a lot about organic chemistry in the solar system in the prebiotic chemistry from the meteorites, I mean, from the asteroid samples that the meteorites are definitely contaminated.

Yeah, that's a great question.

The latter is certainly more or less what we've kind of been leaning towards here in that the asteroids themselves could be seeding Mars and Earth with the prebiotic compounds that are needed for life to have evolved.

But I'm old enough to know that we have meteorites from Mars on the surface of Earth.

And I'm old enough to know that there was a time period when certain physicists said you couldn't get Ross off of Mars to Earth.

And when we finally proved that these are, essentially proved to a high level of confidence that these are from Mars, the calculations showed that you can.

So it's certainly not impossible, but I mean, why go there when we can go with a more simple answer, at least at first to eliminate that.

But yeah.