The 800 gram rose-coloured Teghaza 001 meteorite rock was found in the Sahara Desert in 2022 and has since been identified as a piece of Mars that formed more than 4.1 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest Martian meteorites ever found.
The paper identified several potential locations that match Teghaza 001’s mineralogy and chemistry, without complete certainty.
A separate paper published in Science Advances in June detailed the meteorite’s water content, offering a look at how water shaped the early planet’s surface.
“It was only after we started looking closely that we realised this meteorite is really unique,” said the paper’s lead author, Yang Liu, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
“One of the paper’s reviewers called it a Rosetta Stone for Mars.”
Teghaza 001 is set apart from other Martian meteorites in its texture and age as well as the uniqueness of its igneous or volcanic minerals.
Teghaza 001 has a mix of igneous minerals detailing how the planet’s crust formed from cooling magma before it was eventually altered by subsurface water.
The meteorite’s distinctive mineralogy matches what NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed in the planet’s cratered southern highlands.
“This is really our first piece of Martian crust from a part of Mars we’ve never had a sample of before,” said the new paper’s second author, Lee Saper, who conducted the research while at JPL as a postdoctoral scholar. Lee now is a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
“It records interactions of water and rock and maybe even an imprint of the Martian atmosphere as it was losing water.”
Scientists identified 13 locations on Mars that match the mineralogy and chemistry of Teghaza 001.
Researchers at the University of New Mexico had already identified it as Martian based on its oxygen isotopes, which serve as geochemical fingerprints for different planetary bodies.
In this case, the researchers matched the meteorite’s oxygen isotopes to those seen in other Martian meteorites.
Teghaza 001 appeared to be a shergottite which is the most common class of meteorite from the Red Planet.
Caltech co-author Francois Tissot helped the researchers utilise a novel age-dating method pioneered by his team.
Tissot’s in-situ rubidium-strontium age-dating used a piece of Teghaza 001 that was smaller than a fingernail, analysing single mineral grains on its surface.
“Right now, we are one of very few labs in the world able to perform this kind of age-dating, and the first to date such an ancient Martian meteorite,” Tissot said.
“Our hope is to pave the way for dating even more Martian meteorites, or samples returned from other planets, their moons and asteroids.”
According to the findings, the rock had been altered by Martian water sometime around 4.1 billion years ago, suggesting it originally formed even earlier.
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