New Delhi : A team of Japanese researchers have studied an ancient Martian meteorite and claimed that the water was formed on the Red Planet around 4.4 billion years ago.
Several years ago, a pair of dark meteorites was discovered in the Sahara Desert. They were dubbed NWA 7034 and NWA 7533.
The analysis claimed that the meteorites are new kind of Martian meteorites and are mixtures of different rock fragments.
Such rocks are rare to find and can fetch around $10,000 per gram.
Recently, 50 grams of NWA 7533 was acquired for analysis by the international team in which Professor Takashi Mikouchi at the University of Tokyo participated.
“Our samples of NWA 7533 were subjected to four different kinds of spectroscopic analysis, ways of detecting chemical fingerprints. The results led our team to draw some exciting conclusions,” said Mikouchi in a paper published in the journal Science Advances. It’s well known to planetary scientists that there has been water on Mars for at least 3.7 billion years.
According to the research done on the meteorites, it has been found that the presence of water must be around 4.4 billion years ago.
This oxidation could have occurred if there was water present on or in the Martian crust 4.4 billion years ago during an impact that melted part of the crust.
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