Ancient Mars Meteorite May Reveal Secrets of Life on the Red Planet

First Posted: May 02, 2013 03:20 PM EDT
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Whether or not there was life on Mars has intrigued scientists for decades. Now, they've embarked on a new effort to determine if the conditions on the Red Planet were ever ideal to sustain life. Researchers have examined a meteorite that formed on Mars more than a billion years ago.

Most meteorites that originated on Mars arrived on Earth so long ago that they now have characteristics that only detail their "life" on Earth. This, in turn, obscures any clues they may have once held about their origin on Mars. Yet studying meteorites is important; until a Mars mission successfully returns with actual samples from the Red Planet, the only way to conduct mineralogical studies of geochemical processes on Mars is to rely heavily on data from meteorites.

In order to learn a bit more about the Red Planet, the researchers examined a nakhlite meteorite, which was first recovered in 2003 in the Miller Range of Antarctica. Only about the size of a tennis ball and weighing one and a half pounds, this meteorite was just one of hundreds recovered from that area.

"These meteorites contain water-related mineral and chemical signatures that can signify habitable conditions," said Michael Velbel, MSU geological sciences professor, in a news release. "The trouble is by the time most of these meteorites have been lying around on Earth, they pick up signatures that look like habitable environments because they are. Earth, obviously, is habitable."

After studying the meteorite, the researchers found mineral and chemical signatures that indicated terrestrial weathering--changes that took place on Earth. Actually identifying these signatures will allow researchers in the future to move forward and identify signatures that may be Mars-specific through a process of elimination.

"Our contribution is to provide additional depth and a little broader view than some work has done before in sorting out those two kinds of water-related alterations--the ones that happened on Earth and the ones that happened on Mars," said Velbel in a news release.

While the examination could help future research, it hasn't yet solved the mystery about whether or not life was possible on Mars. For now, it seems like the question of whether the Red Planet was habitable will remain unanswered.

The findings are published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

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