By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo!
News | The Sideshow – Fri, Jan
4, 2013
An
examination of the Martian meteorite known as NWA 7034 determined
it is 2.1 billion years old and is
water-rich. …A 2 billion year old Martian
rock appears to have at one time been full of water from
the surface of the Red Planet.
"Here we have a piece of Mars that I can hold in my hands. That's
really exciting," Carl Agee, director of the Institute of Meteoritics and curator at
the University of New Mexico, told the Associated Press.
Agee led a team of scientists who published their report on the
newly discovered meteorite, nicknamed Black Beauty, in the journal
Science. The rock is estimated to have contained 6,000 parts per
million water, and scientists believe it likely interacted with
water at a time when most of the planet’s surface was believed to
have been arid.
The baseball-size rock was discovered in the Sahara, and scientists
say it contains more evidence of water than any of the other known
Martian rock samples.
"It's fairly fresh. It hasn't been subjected to a whole lot of
weathering," University of Alberta meteorite expert Chris Herd told
the AP.
Billions of years ago, an eruption on the surface of Mars, likely
caused by a volcano or asteroid collision, sent the rock into
space, where it eventually made the journey to Earth. Agee and his
team said the sample is “strikingly similar to the volcanic rocks
examined by the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity on the Martian
surface.”
Over the years, scientists have collected more than 60 Martian rock
samples, with most being discovered in the Sahara and Antarctica.
The new sample is much older than most of the other specimens,
which are about 600 million years old or younger. The oldest known
sample is an estimated 4.5 billion years old.
A private owner donated the Black Beauty finding to the University
of New Mexico.