A rock weighing about 800 grams, picked up in the Sahara in 2022, has been confirmed as one of the oldest pieces of Mars ever found on Earth. NASA reports that scientists dated minerals in the meteorite, named Teghaza 001, and found they formed more than 4.1 billion years ago.
The study, published in the journal Science and led by Yang Liu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, compared the rock’s chemistry and minerals with what orbiters have mapped on the Martian surface. The team identified 13 locations on Mars that match, narrowing down where the stone may have been blasted off the planet long ago.
Rocks this old preserve a record of Mars’s earliest crust, from a time when the planet may have been warmer and wetter. “We’ve only scratched the surface,” Liu said.
Source: NASA