China News Service, Beijing, July 13 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's academic journal "Nature-Communications" recently published a planetary science paper saying that researchers have discovered the oldest known Mars on Earth. A study of meteorite (NWA) 7034 found that its fragments came from a collision that formed the Khujirt crater about 1.5 billion years ago.
According to the paper, clues to the formation of the Earth may be obtained from other terrestrial planets such as Mars.
However, the only samples currently documenting early conditions on Mars are the Northwest African (NWA) 7034 meteorite and its pair.
The meteorite contains the oldest (about 4.5 billion years old) Martian igneous rock material to date.
However, the original origin of the meteorite has remained unclear.
Corresponding author of the paper, Anthony Lagain of Curtin University, Australia, in collaboration with colleagues and international colleagues, calculated the size and spatial distribution of more than 90 million impact craters through a crater detection algorithm, and used this information to determine the size and spatial distribution of craters. The most likely ejection point for this material on Mars.
They found that the oldest fragments of (NWA) 7034 came from a collision about 1.5 billion years ago that formed the Kuret crater, a 40-kilometer diameter crater located in the Cimmeria-Siren Highlands in the southern hemisphere of Mars Northeast of the area.
Material ejected from this collision was then ejected again from Mars in a second collision that formed the Karratha crater 5 million to 10 million years ago.
The authors of the paper point out that this Martian region uniquely records the first tens of millions of years of Mars' history and should be a target for future human analysis and exploration of Mars' orbit.
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