Scientists announced Tuesday that they have found the crater from which the oldest known meteorite on Mars was originally detonated. The earth, a discovery that could provide clues to how our planet was formed. Meteorite NWA 7034, nicknamed Black Beauty, has intrigued geologists since it was discovered in the Sahara in 2011.
It fits comfortably in the hand, weighs just over 300 grams (10.6 ounces) and contains a mixture of materials including zircons, dating back nearly 4.5 billion years.
“That makes it one Sylvain Bouley, a planetary scientist at France’s University of Paris-Saclay, told AFP.
Its journey begins in the early days of the solar system, “about 80 million years after the planets began to form,” says Bouley, Who co-author of a new study of meteorites.
Tectonic plates have long covered Earth’s ancient crust, meaning “we’ve lost our planet’s primordial history,” Bouley said.
But Black Beauty could provide “an open book about the planet’s earliest moments,” he added.
To open that book, a team of researchers at Australia’s Curtin University set out to search for the original meteorite. Home page on Mars.
They know it could be a small planet attack the red planet causing Black Beauty to shoot at space.
The impact “has enough force to push the rocks out at very high speeds – more than five kilometers (three miles) a second – to escape the gravity of Mars,” says Curtin’s Anthony Lagain, lead author of the study above. Nature Communications, told AFP.
Such a crater would have to be very large – at least three kilometers in diameter.
Problem? Pits face of the Mars there are about 80,000 craters at least as large.
– Follow the clues –
But the researchers had a clue: by measuring Black Beauty’s exposure to cosmic rays, they learned that it was separated from its first home about five million years ago.
“So we’re looking for a crater that’s very young and big,” Lagain said.
Another clue is its composition that suggests it suddenly warmed up about 1.5 million years ago – likely due to the impact of a second asteroid.
Then the group created a algorithm and use a Super computer to glance at images of 90 million craters taken by a NASA satellite.
That narrowed it down to 19 craters, allowing the researchers to rule out the remaining suspects.
They found that the Black Beauty was dug up from its first home by an asteroid that struck some 1.5 billion years ago, forming the 40-kilometer-long Khujirt crater.
Then a few million years ago, another asteroid hit not far away, creating the 10 km long Karratha crater and shooting Black Beauty towards Earth.
The area in the southern hemisphere of Mars is rich in the elements potassium and thorium, like Black Beauty.
Another factor is that Black Beauty is the only Martian meteorite that is highly magnetic.
“The area where Karratha was found is the most magnetic on Mars,” Lagain said.
Known as the Terra Cimmeria-Sirenum province, it is “a relic of the early crustal processes of Mars, and therefore an area of great interest for future missions”, research said.
Bouley points to the “bias” in the missions currently being planned to Mars to look for signs of water and life.
But understanding how the planets first formed should answer some fundamental questions, Lagain said, including “how did Earth become such a special planet in the Universe.”
