Alex Wilkins is a writer.
Mars is photographed by a camera on a NASA probe.
NASA/JPL.
The idea of how Mars formed is being upended by a meteorite that landed more than 200 years ago. The analysis shows that the Red Planet's chemical make-up came from meteorites rather than from a cloud of gases. The formation of Mars is similar to that of Earth.
The majority of what we know about Mars is from meteorites that landed on Earth after being blasted off Mars.
There were previous analyses that looked at the chemistry of xenon, a gas that can survive for millions of years. Specific ratios that can be tied to a place and time can be found in the isotopes.
The meteorite seemed to match the atmosphere of Mars and the cloud of gas that formed the solar system. The hypothesis was that the Red Planet's volatile elements, such as hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, came from the sun.
Sandrine Péron and Sujoy Mukhopadhyay at the University of California, Davis used a high-resolution mass spectrometer to analyse a sample from Chassigny.
Péron says that it is not hard to distinguish the source of volatiles with krypton. It had not been done before because of the difficulty in measuring the difference between potential sources like solar or meteorites.
There is a piece of a meteorite in Vienna.
Valugi is a member of the CC BY-SA.
They found that the isotopes came from meteorites. Péron says that this means that the solar-derived mantle wasn't the source of the atmosphere on Mars. The gases in the atmosphere came from somewhere. Péron says it could be that they were trapped in the ground if the young Mars grew quickly.
The work could change the picture of how Mars was formed, as well as shore up the theory of planetary formation in our solar system.
Chris Ballentine is a researcher at the University of Oxford. The result is that Mars looks closer to the way the Earth formed and the way that Earth acquired volatiles, which gives us a better idea of how planets acquire their volatile elements.
Understanding how volatile elements are acquired and distributed is important for understanding a planet's chemical make-up. The structure and distribution of elements in the planet are controlled by the timing and source of the volatiles.
The journal is called Science.
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