Space News Archive - March 27, 2008

What Shinji Suzuki once considered to be an outrageous idea is beginning to take shape as scientists in Japan are combining their efforts with origami virtuosos to construct a paper airplane they hope to send to space one day.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn have detected for the first time a molecule closely related to an amino acid: amino acetonitrile. The organic molecule was found with a 30 meter radio telescope in Spain and two radio interferometers in France and Australia in the "Large Molecule Heimat", a giant gas cloud near the galactic centre in the constellation Sagittarius (Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press).