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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!
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?
Yeah, I saw the "magmatism is the main process by which water moves from the core of planets to their surface" thing and coughed quietly to myself *cough* *cough*.
Core differentiation generally happens REALLY early in planet's history, and it seems to me that it isn't precisely correct to say magmatism in this context, (which implies "volcanism" at least to me). Bouyancy and heat are what really moves water to the surface, since it is a) much less dense than rock (think about it) and b) not real stable at real high T.
In other words -- what moves water around is a whole mess of ugly chemistry and thermodynamics that I'll leave to my petrologist buddies to explain to me (dah? dah!) with odd pentagonal diagrams.
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.
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