Wild images of Martian meteorites Lead to Information About Mars’s Ancient Surface and Atmosphere

By James W. Dottin III

                    

               

“Are those fossils of a piranha and a griffon”? This may be the first question to pop into your mind! Your second question may be, “wait was there life on Mars”? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is no. These are two images of a Martian volcanic rock, found in Antarctica, that formed skeletal-type minerals within itself.  Although, the cool photos fail at answering the question of life on Mars, they do provide us with valuable information about how the surface of Mars interacted with its atmosphere. Previous studies on these Martian rocks have told us that when you use chemistry to separate sulfur from the Martian rocks and analyze it closely, you receive data that tell you that early on in Mars’s lifetime, the sun was ripping apart molecules that are bound by sulfur in the atmosphere in cool and unusual ways. The images tell us how the sulfur got into the rocks!!

I was able to use a microscope with a camera to take really zoomed in pictures of the Martian meteorite and load the images into a computer program that is able to detect small differences in color within the image. The colors of interest in these images are the light/tan/gold color of the “fossil looking minerals” and the really tiny bright gold/yellow specs which are the sulfur minerals. I hypothesized that the we found sulfur in these rocks due to a process called “assimilation”, a lava flow picking up material as it flows across a surface. A proposed chemical reaction suggested that we should expect a certain amount of “fossil looking minerals” to sulfur minerals. The computer software calculated the amount of “fossil looking minerals” and sulfur minerals (by distinguishing their color differences) and confirmed that the hypothesis was indeed correct!

So what’s the overall big picture? Billions of years ago, the sun ripped a bunch of sulfur molecules apart, allowing the sulfur to fall onto the surface of mars. A volcano erupted, spewing lava over the surface, allowing the lava to capture and incorporate the sulfur into the flow. The lava cooled and became rock. A large asteroid hit mars and ejected large amounts of surface material into space. Some of the surface material traveled through space and made its way to earth and fell in Antarctica. Brave meteorite hunters found the Martian rock, it was delivered to me, and I delivered this information to you. Thank you for reading my blog and stay tuned!