Black Beauty Martian meteorite is 'a SPOT-ON match with Red Planet's DARK PLAINS' (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Monday, February 02, 2015, 05:10

Scientists believe that a recently discovered Martian meteorite – dubbed Black Beauty – is representative of the "bulk background" of rocks on the surface of Mars.

The 4.4 billion-year-old space stone, AKA NWA7034, was found in the Moroccan desert several years ago.

Now, new research based on analysis of the rock apparently lends weight to the claim that Black Beauty is very similar to "vast swaths" of Mars' crust.

Boffins from Rhode Island's Brown University and the University of New Mexico have published their findings in the journal Icarus.

The space stone is the first such sample to match the "chemical makeup of rocks analysed by the Mars rovers." Unsurprisingly, then, researchers have pored over the Martian meteorite for four years now.

For this particular study, Kevin Cannon, Jack Mustard and Carl Agee acquired a chip of Black Beauty before using a number of spectroscopic techniques to analyse it.

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