Almost a century ago, a meteorite turned up in a drawer at Purdue University. By the university’s own account, how it got there is a mystery — and if someone doesn’t draw inspiration from this and create the great Midwestern steampunk novel of our time, it’ll be a huge missed opportunity. A piece of the Lafayette Meteorite, as it’s known, returned to Purdue 90 years after first being discovered there in 1929. And as it turns out, scientists are continuing to learn new things from the ancient rock — including details about the waters of Mars.
Earlier this month, the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters published a paper that looked to the Lafayette Meteorite in the hopes of getting more information on the history of water on Mars. Their research delved into nakhlites, a group of igneous rocks that originated on the fourth planet from the sun. By examining them, the scientists hoped to get a better sense of just when there was water on the Red Planet.
After pursuing this line of inquiry, though, questions remain. “The question of when Lafayette and the other nakhlites were exposed to liquid water on Mars remains unresolved,” the paper’s authors wrote. As Live Science’s Stephanie Pappas pointed out, their findings did reveal more about the age of the meteorites; in other words, they haven’t yet reached the billion-year mark.
More specifically, the scientists believe that the meteorites encountered Martian water over 700 million years ago. “[T]he timing for aqueous alteration of Martian volcanic rocks by water was unrelated to their emplacement or an impact event, but most likely related to ongoing magmatic activity on Mars ca. 742 [million years ago],” they wrote. The Lafayette Meteorite’s history at Purdue might only go back a century, but its information about the solar system dates back much further.
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