Made on Mars
Dear HIW, Mars is in the news lately, and I frequently read about meteorites that arrived from Mars. How do we know this? There are a zillion possible places a meteorite could come from. We have no actual samples to compare these meteorites to, and I doubt they are stamped ‘made on Mars’, so how can we be so sure? Ralph Varney Today scientists have the tools and data to be able to determine where some meteorites originated. But this was not always possible. Thanks to spacecraft such as NASA’S Viking landers, which touched down on Mars in the 1970s, we now know the chemical composition of Martian rock. After this analysis of Mars’ composition, it was discovered that many meteorites with unknown origins – which had been found before the Viking program – had the same chemicals inside. They also showed the same precise concentrations of these chemicals and contained the same trapped gases.