Space: Point of origin of meteorite that fell from Mars identified

A team of scientists spotted it exact “birth” point of a meteorite that fell from Mars into the Sahara and is considered a real “open book” that will provide evidence for the creation of not only the Red Planet but possibly also for the formation of the Earth.

THE “Black Beauty”, as meteorite NWA 7034 is affectionately called, has fascinated geologists since 2011, when it was spotted in the Sahara. It is a stone that fits in the palm of your hand and weighs just over 300 grams. Considered “the oldest rock we have from Mars”, as explained by the planetary scientist Sylvain Boulet, one of the authors of the study published in the scientific journal Nature Communications. Contains zirconsa kind of mineral, 4.48 billion years old. That is, “about 80 million years after the planets began to form” of our solar system, said Boulet, who is a professor at the Laboratory of Geosciences at the University of Paris-Saclay.

NWA 7034 is therefore “an open book on the first moments of Mars”, when the surface of the planet’s magma began to solidify. Earth’s corresponding “primitive history” has been lost, which was not the case on Mars. The scientists, led by planetary scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, managed to pinpoint the exact origin of the meteorite in a spot on Mars where this primitive “crust” still exists.

First they would have to locate one crater formed by a meteor that reached Mars from space and was powerful enough to hurl rocks at speeds of more than 5 kilometers per second – so they could escape Martian gravity, explained Anthony Lagaine, a planetary scientist at Curtin University. This crater should have a diameter of at least 3 kilometers. The problem: there are nearly 80,000 craters of this size on Mars.

The researchers, studying the meteorite’s exposure to cosmic radiation, knew that NWA 7034 was blasted into space about 5 million years ago. “So we were looking for a very young and large crater,” said Lagain, whose PhD is specifically about the dating of Martian craters. Another clue was that the chemical analysis of the “Black Beauty” revealed that this rock was suddenly superheated about 1.5 billion years ago, possibly by its collision with an asteroid. In other words, the rock first detached itself from the surface of Mars and fell a little further, and then, by another impact, it was launched into space and reached Earth.

Based on this information, Anthony Lagain improved a crater detection algorithm developed at Curtin University. And he applied it, thanks to a supercomputer, to a mosaic made up of 90 million photos of Martian craters, taken thanks to the camera of a NASA satellite.

From this analysis, initially 19 craters emerged as possible generators of the “Black Beauty” and then only one, Karatha, which has a diameter of 10 kilometers and is located in the southern hemisphere of Mars. It is an area rich in potassium and thorium, two elements that abound in “Mavri Kalloni”.

Scientists believe that this zone is “apparently a relic of the ancient crust of the planet Mars” and would be worth sending a mission to study its geology.

Boulet recalled that missions to the Red Planet to date have focused on the search for water and life. However, understanding planet formation is about exactly what happened in those first moments and “how we got to such an amazing planet as Earth,” Lagain stressed.

RES-EMP

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