What seemed to be a fairly unimportant and minor tropical storm threatening Sri Lanka and South-east India, turned into Tropical Cyclone DITWAH, which arose about a week ago, and triggered severe flooding and landslides. By Friday, GDACS was reporting 479 deaths in Sri Lanka, another 350 people missing, and a total of 1.7 million individuals affected by flooding in one way or another.

Greg Mossop G0DUB drew our attention to a communique from the President of the Radio Society of Sri Lanka (RSSL), the national IARU Member Society representing licensed amateur radio operators in Sri Lanka, wishing formally to notify the international amateur radio community that Sri Lanka is currently experiencing severe and widespread flooding, resulting in significant disruption to telecommunication networks and essential infrastructure.

Theranga Premathilake, call sign 4S6TMP, said that, at the request of the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) and the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL), RSSL has mobilized and deployed trained volunteer amateur radio operators across several affected districts to provide Emergency Communications (EmComm) where conventional systems have failed.

In order to maintain and expand these critical communication links during the ongoing crisis, the RSSL urgently requires additional equipment. He respectfully requested assistance from IARU Member Societies, global amateur radio communities, EmComm groups, and supporting donors to help supply HF and VHF base radios, handheld VHF/UHF radios, and rechargeable power packs to help the amateurs to keep lines of communication up and running around the country.

He noted further that any support, whether through equipment donations, financial facilitation, or procurement assistance will directly strengthen Sri Lanka’s disaster response capabilities at this critical time.

Although the coast of India was also threatened by DITWAH, there has been no news of similar flooding or casualties in that country.

Indonesia, Thailand and Sumatra, however, are still affected by heavy rainfall, with 770 deaths in Sumatra and 185 in Thailand reported by the end of the week, with about 830 people still missing in the two countries, and at least a million people displaced by flooding.

And by Tuesday, Tropical Cyclone KOTO, with maximum wind speeds of 150 km/h was crossing Philippines and aiming at Vietnam next. Luckily, it appeared to be weakening as it approached Vietnam.

Newsweek.com reported on Monday that NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a sunspot—labeled Active Region (AR) 4294-96—which is the largest recorded in a decade, and which is expected to trigger further solar flares in the coming weeks.

An X1.9-class solar flare was detected by Earth-orbiting satellites on the same day, although, according to SpaceWeather.com, it actually originated from a smaller sunspot—named AR 4295, rather than the giant one.

However, 4294 is impressively massive, in photos taken of the sun’s disk this week, much bigger than the sunspot of two weeks ago that generated the X5.1-class flare which caused such beautiful auroras in northern and southern latitudes, and blanked out radio communications so effectively. It remains to be seen whether 4294 impresses us with solar high jinks this week.

Universetoday.com notes that it’s been over two years since the samples from Asteroid Bennu gathered by the satellite OSIRIS-REx were returned to Earth. But there’s still plenty of novel science coming out of that 121.6 g of material. Three new papers were released recently that describe different aspects of that sample. One in particular, from Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan and their co-authors, has already attracted plenty of attention, including from US Senator (and former astronaut) Mark Kelly. It shows that all of the building blocks for early life were available on the asteroid – raising the chances that planets throughout the galaxy could be seeded with the abiotic precursors for life.

To be clear, the most recent paper itself didn’t first discover all of the necessary ingredients for life. Two of the parts of the “molecular trifecta” required for the origin of life were already discovered on Bennu. Nucleobases – the molecules that make up the sequence of DNA – and amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – were previously discovered and disclosed in other papers on the asteroid.

After subjecting a 600 mg sample of the pristine surface material of Bennu to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, the researchers found two additional types of “sugars” for the first time. But don’t think of these sugars as equivalent to the high fructose corn syrup used to sweeten Twinkies. These sugars are basic organic molecules integral to the functioning of all biological systems known on Earth.

One new sugar they found was ribose, the molecule that serves as the backbone of RNA (or ribonucleic acid). RNA is a critical component of modern life, and perhaps most famously recently served as the base for many of COVID-19 vaccines. Granted, the total concentration of ribose was very small, with a concentration of only .097 nanomoles per gram of asteroid material. But the most important thing about this finding is that it was there at all.

There’s an ongoing debate about the origin of life, where some scientists suggest that, instead of having complex DNA in the beginning, early life was based on RNA instead as its information transfer mechanism. This study adds some more evidence for that hypothesis, showing that all the components of RNA are available on an asteroid, and can be protected from the destructive radiation of outer space by being trapped in rocky aggregates – until they land on a receptive planet’s surface at least. This also undermines the argument that ribose is too unstable to have accumulated on early Earth, when life would have first started.

At its core, this paper confirms that the potential basic building blocks of life are all present on asteroids. And more importantly on only the second asteroid we’ve ever sampled – which implies that they are likely abundant not only throughout our solar system, but throughout our galaxy. That has major implications for the study of life on other worlds, and while we still haven’t found definitive evidence of that yet, the more we learn about the evolution of life in our own backyard, the more exciting the prospect of eventually finding it elsewhere seems to be.

This is Dave Reece, ZS1DFR, wondering whether I can sweeten my tea with two spoons of Bennu, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.