A newly found Mars meteorite is revealing the secrets of a previously hidden time period of Red Planet geological history.
The 1.27-billion-year-old space rock, called Northwest Africa (NWA) 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019 — but its age was not confirmed until recently. Now scientists say the meteorite helps answer questions about a huge gap in the Martian geologic record: a span of time between 600 million years ago and 2.4 billion years ago.
This vast timespan has no known examples of meteorites containing igneous (solid magma) shergottites, which are the most abundant type of Martian meteorites, chunks of the Red Planet that were blasted away by impacts, ejected into space and eventually fell to Earth. The only meteorites known from this time range, roughly 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion years ago, are rarer types known as chassignites and nahklites. As such, the newly analyzed meteorite is opening new insights already about this time period.
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