An asteroid struck Mars 11 million years ago and sent pieces of the red planet hurtling through space. One of these chunks of Mars eventually crashed into the Earth and is one of the few meteorites that can be traced directly to Mars.
This meteorite was rediscovered in a drawer at Purdue University in 1931 and therefore named the Lafayette Meteorite. During early investigations of the Lafayette Meteorite, scientists discovered that it had interacted with liquid water while on Mars . Scientists have long wondered when that interaction with liquid water took place. Scientists have recently determined the age of the minerals in the Lafayette Meteorite that formed when there was liquid water.
"Dating these minerals can therefore tell us when there was liquid water at or near the surface of Mars in the planet's geologic past," she says."We dated these minerals in the Martian meteorite Lafayette and found that they formed 742 million years ago. We do not think there was abundant liquid water on the surface of Mars at this time.
Ryan Ickert, senior research scientist with Purdue EAPS, is a co-author of the paper. He uses heavy radioactive and stable isotopes to study the timescales of geological processes. He demonstrated that other isotope data were problematic and had likely been affected by other processes. But once Lafayette hit Earth, the story gets a little muddy. It is known for certain that the meteorite was found in a drawer at Purdue University in 1931. But how it got there is still a mystery. Tremblay and others made strides in explaining the history of the post-Earth timeline in a recent publication.
"Before moving to Purdue, Ryan and I were both based at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, where the argon-argon isotopic analyses of the alteration minerals in Lafayette took place" Tremblay says."Our collaborators at SUERC, the University of Glasgow, and the Natural History Museum have previously done a lot of work studying the history of Lafayette."
Because of the Stahura Undergraduate Meteorite Fund, Tremblay and Ickert will be able to continue studying the geochemistry and histories of meteorites and undergraduates at Purdue EAPS will be able to assist in this research.A research team has investigated a meteorite from Mars using neutron and X-ray tomography. The technology, which will probably be used when NASA examines samples from the Red Planet in 2030, showed ...
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