SYDNEY, July 14 (Xinhua) -- Australian researchers studying one of the best-known meteorites to have ever landed on Earth believe they have pinpointed the crater it came from on Mars.
The team from the Space Science and Technology Center at Curtin University claimed their findings about meteorite NWA 7034, or better known as "Black Beauty", provide fresh insights into Mars' origins.
Their research, published in Nature Communications and revealed on Wednesday, identified the previously obscure crater that ejected the 320-gram chunk of blackened volcanic crystal which was found in the Sahara Desert in northern Africa in 2011.
Black Beauty has long intrigued the scientific community as it contains an array of rock types which have been cemented together, making it different from the several hundred other Martian meteorites that have so far been discovered.
"Black Beauty contains the oldest Martian fragments ever found, aged at 4.48 billion years old," said Anthony Lagain from Curtin University.
Lagain said there were similarities between the ancient surface of Mars and Earth and, as such, provides a "window into the earliest environment of the planets."
"We know very little about this early stage of planetary evolution on Earth," Lagain wrote in an article published in The Conversation on Wednesday. "Erosion and the movement of tectonic plates on Earth make it very difficult to find rocks that old."
The researchers made their discovery by analyzing a huge volume of high-resolution planetary images using a supercomputer running algorithms developed by a multidisciplinary team from the Curtin Institute for Computation and School of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, as well as the Pawsey Supercomputing Center and the Australian Space Data Analysis Facility.
Explaining the process, Lagain said the team "sifted through more than 94 million craters to identify the origin of the rocky Martian visitor" which had been created by an asteroid impact.
"This catalog of craters is the largest ever created and allows us to understand the history of their creation at a resolution never equaled before," he wrote.
Their search ended with a previously unnamed crater which contained all the meteorite's distinctive characteristics.
Cosmic mineralogist Gretchen Benedix said the research paved the way to "locate the ejection site of other Martian meteorites, in order to create the most exhaustive view of the Red Planet's geological history."
"We are also adapting the algorithm that was used to pinpoint Black Beauty's point of ejection from Mars to unlock other secrets from the Moon and Mercury," she said.
"This will help to unravel their geological history and answer burning questions that will help future investigations of the solar system." ■