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Martian Rock Found In Morocco
daeley writes "The BBC is reporting that a rock found in 2001 in Morocco is originally from Mars, similar in composition to the 1977 Antartica find. 'The meteorite would have been blasted off the Red Planet by an impact and may hold clues to Mars' watery past... scientists say the fragments are magmatic rocks. Magmatism is the main process by which water moves from the core of planets to their surface.'"
...we find another Martian rock here on Earth. For those of you that don't think fate doesn't have a sense of irony, I think that this story proves it. ;)
libertarianswag.com
Instead of us having to go to Mars, Mars is coming to us!
I thought that magnetism was a process that involved two pieces of metal being attracted to each other. Oh, you said magmatism ...
AFAIK, the parent is wrong.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Oh geez, I better load up on duct tape if the fucking Martians are coming.
the Earth is littering Mars with spacecraft debris. Mars just wants a little payback.
Did they find Beagle 2 on it?
We have rovers on Mars collecting data that has no chance of being contaminated by a meteorite impact, travel through space and terrestrial processes.
I'll take data from the horse's mouth.
Rock on, Rovers!
From the article: The team that found it was led by experienced meteorite hunters Carine Bidaut and Bruno Fectay, who have now found six rocks from Mars - a record.
Interesting that they seem to know *just* where to find Martian rocks.
Quick! Get them! They're Martian spies!
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Uh...Nice cut and paste. Maybe you should think of something original next time.
That's odd... the piece of Mars I have on my desk is composed of entirely different substances: Milk Solids (40%), cocoa, emulsifiers, caramel, glucose etc. Scientists believe that it came from the Mare Saccharum region on Mars...
the distance from the earth to mars, at its closest is more than 55 million kilometers (33 million miles). the article states that about 20 such rocks have been found on earth so far. It seems that Mar at some point must have undergone some pretty serious bombardment from asteroids, and big ones too it seems, if the impacts caused martian rock to leave its gravitational field, and come all the way to earth. It seems like trying to throw a dart at an ant from 100 yards
What's next? Are we now going to find out that the rocks being analyzed by Spirit are actually from earth?
It is easier for Mars debri to transfer to Earth than the other way around because of the stronger gravity on Earth. I read somewhere that Earth's gravity is on the borderline of being too strong to allow rocks to escape via meteor impact. One might say that some impacts are much stronger than others so that fast ones might still do it. However, past a certain impact energy, ejected material vaporizes such that there are no projectiles left.
In other words, too slow and rocks cannot reach escape velocity. Too fast and rocks vaporize from the heat of the impact. The middle "just right" window may not exist, or barely exist on Earth, but is relatively wide on Mars because of lower gravity.
Thus, if there are Earth rocks on Mars, there will be far far fewer compared to the other way around.
Table-ized A.I.
Perhaps you mean another, now defunct, Sun. Ours is still made of Hydrogen.
Almost every piece of matter on Earth came from defunct Suns (stars) what exploded at the end of their lives. The very monitor you are staring at is left-over star boom boom. It is suspected that heavy elements like gold came from supernovas or hypernovas, really big stars with really big booms, the kind that can outshine entire galaxies for a few days or weeks. So next time you see a gold ring, realize that it came from the largest kind of explosions known in the entire universe. Booms beyond human comprehension.
Table-ized A.I.
Better turn down the power on Spirit's drive wheels.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
What you are calling "science" is really science reporting. Science reporting summarizes the real science and leaves out the qualifiers and statistical information from the original published peer-reviewed work. Science reporting frequently offers broad and sweeping conclusions of hard fact from original work that only reports on evidence that such a conclusion may be true. Even science textbooks are basically summaries of the original research and omit the nuances. Science reporting is a hollow shell of real science.
To understand what the scientists are really saying you have to go read and understand the original articles.
Imagine a large asteroid hitting mars. There will be BILLIONS of pieces sent into an orbit similar to mars, many of which will then be gravtationally tossed into other orbits by mars itself. It's not hard to imagine many many of these eventually landing on earth within the billion years or so since then.
There are alot more than 6 pieces that have been found, these two people just happen to collect ALOT of meteorites and happen to know how to recognize a martian one. Of course it sounds like too much coincidence to be true when you think only 6 have hit earth and all been found by the same people, but in reality thousands and probably millions have hit earth, and many have been found and not recognized for what they are. It only makes sense that the people who know how to recognize them would find the most.