A few grams of Mars in Valencia
VALENCIA’S museum of science has added a fragment of a meteorite from Mars to its exhibition ‘Mars. The conquest of a dream’.
The display is on the third floor of the museum, where the public can ‘experience and discover the most relevant and curious facts about the red planet’.
The fragment will accompany other pieces of ‘great value’, due to their historic or documentary interest, including replicas of astronomy books such as ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium’ (on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres), a seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, and Astronomia nova (new astronomy) by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, as well as a replica of
Galileo Galilei’s first telescope, and two 3D printed models that recreate possible habitats for human colonies on Mars.
Martian meteorites are rocks that were ejected from Mars due to impacts on the planet's surface. With a size of 21.2x18.8 and 8x13.3 millimetres and a weight of 5.58 grams, this fragment is a small part of the meteorite found in Mauritania in 2017, weighing 524g and is classified as a shergottites achondritic (stony) meteorite.
The exhibit in Valencia is behind a glass screen and visitors can observe the black covering, called a ‘fusion crust’ that developed the moment it entered the earth’s atmosphere.
Due to the great speed at which meteorites cross the layers of the atmosphere, there is a considerable increase in temperature caused by friction and this causes the materials on their surface to melt or ‘burn’ giving rise to this black layer or crust.
For further information and to plan a visit to the museum, which forms part of the city’s iconic City of Arts and Sciences, visit the website https://www.cac.es/en/museude-les-ciencies/ and follow the ‘Exhibitions’ link in the menu box.