200 meteorites on Earth traced to 5 craters on Mars

[Admin]

Astronomers have traced the origins of 200 meteorites to five impact craters in two volcanic regions on Mars, known as Tharsis and Elysium.

200 meteorites on Earth traced to 5 craters on Mars : Read more

 

[progan01]

I have to wonder if this process can't be used on Mars to identify impacts from Earth. Is it possible that fragments from the Chicxulub impactor made it to Mars? Given the relatively slow pace of weathering and erosion on the Red Planet, could we expect to find remnants of even earlier impacts, like the Sudbury event, or more recent like the Popigai events? A possibility to consider.

 

[billslugg]

I have to wonder if this process can't be used on Mars to identify impacts from Earth. Is it possible that fragments from the Chicxulub impactor made it to Mars? Given the relatively slow pace of weathering and erosion on the Red Planet, could we expect to find remnants of even earlier impacts, like the Sudbury event, or more recent like the Popigai events? A possibility to consider.

The process can be used on any sample of at least a microgram or two. Mount it on a slide, put it into a vacuum chamber, look at it with a microscope and hit selected grains with a laser. The cloud of gas produced is ionized, accelerated by electric fields, subjected to a transverse magnetic field and the fanned out beam lands on a silicon detector. A detailed map is made of every mass spike. The amounts of each isotope of each element can be determined. From these ratios, scientists can tell how old it is, from where in the Solar Nebula it originated, which planet it came from, etc.

 

[progan01]

The process to determine the composition of meteoritic fragments is not in doubt. The real question is identifying which fragments originated from Earth, and distinguishing them from other impact fragments of similar composition. At present we do not know the precise composition of the Chicxulub impactor, our second most-recent such body, and finding fragments of it on Mars or elsewhere will require considerable refinement of our understanding of multiple planetary morphologies to sort out Earth impactor fragments from others, including Martian ones. We need a larger body of knowledge of the composition of near-solar planets to accomplish this. But doing so will provide us the basis for an even more difficult identification task -- that of determining whether any fragments on Mars or Earth came in fact from impacts with Venus. That's going to be a search that must rely on much greater information on planetary composition than we possess at present.