© APA/AFP/NASA/HANDOUT / HANDOUT
A few meteorites that land on Earth every day come from Mars. They were ejected from the atmosphere when meteorites hit Mars and scattered into space. Some of them always make it back to Earth. So far have already been 188 pieces founddie clearly from Mars come. Many of them contain a rock mixture that can only be created by extremely high loads. A team of researchers has now found how big this burden must beto launch a piece of Mars into space and onto Earth.
The Black Beauty meteorite was found in Africa. He is from Mars
© NASA
Shoot rocks with a cannon
“We’re not on Mars, so we can’t personally observe a meteorite hit, but we can similar kind of hit in a lab adjust,” says Yang Liu of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from NASA and Caltech University. “We found out that there was a lot less pressure than expected takes to launch a Martian meteorite.”
Previous experiments have shown that a pressure of 30 gigapascals – which corresponds to 1000 times the water pressure at a depth of 3 kilometers – is required to break down the type of rock Plagioclase (or soda lime feldspar) in Maskelyns (a kind of glass) to transform. At JPL, researchers have now built a kind of cannon with which they can extract plagioclase from Earth shoot at different speeds can.
With this device, Mars-like rocks were sealed from Earth
© JPL/ Jinping Hu
Exactly find respective origin crater
They found out that the boundary of the transition between plagioclase and maskelynite is already at 20 Gigapascal lies. “The difference between 30 and 20 gigapascals is significant,” says Paul Asimov, one of the researchers involved. “The more accurately we can characterize the shock pressure a meteorite was subjected to, the more likely it is that we can Identify impact craters on Mars know where he came from.”
Some Martian meteorites found on Earth have already been able to say with reasonable certainty that where on Mars they were blasted off, reports Science Alert. That one can even say with certainty that a piece of rock comes from Mars is due air pockets. If the gas composition in it corresponds exactly to that of the Martian atmosphere, clear evidence has been found.
