Scientists find oldest Martian meteorite's original home
Scientists announced Tuesday they had found the crater from which the oldest known Martian meteorite was originally blasted towards Earth, a discovery that could provide clues into how our own planet was formed. The meteorite NWA 7034, nicknamed Black Beauty, has fascinated geologists since it was discovered in the Sahara Desert in 2011.
It fits easily in the hand, weighing just over 300 grams (10.6 ounces), and contains a mix of materials including zircons, which date back nearly 4.5 billion years.
"That makes it one of the oldest rocks studied in the history of geology," Sylvain Bouley, a planetary scientist at France's Paris-Saclay University, told AFP.
Its journey dates back to the solar system's infancy, "about 80 million years after the planets began forming", said Bouley, who co-authored a new study on the meteorite.
Tectonic plates long ago covered up Earth's ancient crust, meaning that "we have lost this primitive history of our planet", Bouley said.
But Black Beauty could offer "an open book on a planet's first moments", he added.
To open that book, a team of researchers at Australia's Curtin University set out to find the meteorite's original home on Mars.
They knew that it was likely an asteroid hitting the red planet that sent Black Beauty shooting up into space.
The impact "had enough force to eject the rocks at very high speed -- more than five kilometres (three miles) a second -- to escape the Martian gravity", Curtin's Anthony Lagain, the lead author of the study in Nature Communications, told AFP.
Such a crater would have to be massive -- at least three kilometres in diameter.
The problem? The pockmarked surface of Mars has around 80,000 craters at least that big.
- Following the clues -
But the researchers had a
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