New York Times Space&Cosmos
A piece of Mars fell on Morocco in July. But that was just the start of its travels onEarth.
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Natural History Museum
The 2.4-pound meteorite purchased by the Natural History Museum in London is a shergottite, a young rock that formed on Mars just a few hundred million years ago.
The biggest chunk of the meteorite flew from Morocco to Paris to New York, where the collector who bought it bicycled around town around with it in his backpack. Finally, this week, it flew to London.
The Natural History Museum there announcedWednesday that it had purchased the meteorite for its collection. “I would say, arguably, it is the most significant fall in a hundred years,” said Caroline Smith , the museum’s meteorite curator.
Of the tens of thousands of meteorites that have been found on Earth, only 61 came from Mars. And this new one is only the fifth Martian meteorite whose fiery passage through the atmosphere was seen by people on the ground.
That is significant for scientists. In the case of witnessed meteorite falls, they know the space rocks have been on ground for only a short time, and the contaminating effects of water and chemical reactions on Earth are minimal. The desert environs of Morocco further ensure that the Martian minerals in this meteorite — which was named Tissint, after a nearby village — are essentially pristine.
The mineralogy of Tissint appears to match that of the most common type of Martian meteorite. The rocks appear to have solidified out of Martian magma 400 million to 500 million years ago and knocked off of Mars just a million years ago — very recently, in the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system.
While the meteorite is unlikely to shed information on whether early Mars was hospitable to life, it will provide clues about the history of volcanism there.
“It’s not in and of itself drastically different from things we found before,” said Anthony Irving, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington who analyzed a fragment of the meteorite. “It’s an extra wrinkle.=
