Supercomputer pinpoints where exactly 'Black Beauty' oddity came from Mars
An international team thinks its managed to pinpoint where a 4.5 billion year old meteorite found on Earth came from on Mars.
The rock – known as Black Beauty, or more prosaically NWA 7034 – has intrigued scientists since its discovery in 2011 because it's the oldest Martian igneous rock ever identified. Finding NWA 7034's origin point wouldn't have been possible without modern supercomputing, which algorithmically narrowed down Black Beauty's origins from some 90 million Martian impact craters to just 17 that met size, age, and geochemical requirements that would indicate a match. The idea being to find a crater that was the result of something crashing into the Red Planet, a smash that spewed a bunch of rock, some of which would have come to Earth as Black Beauty.
Based on their findings, the team concluded that Black Beauty's crater was the third in a series formed when an asteroid hit Mars some 1.5 billion years ago. That impact formed the 40km-wide Khujirt crater, rocks from which rained down on the Martian surface a dozen kilometers from Khurjirt, forming the Dampier crater.
Dampier, in turn, was struck between five and ten million years ago, forming another crater and ejecting the meteoroid that would eventually become Black Beauty. Dr Anthony Lagain, lead author on the team's
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