Lagain was able to rule out the northern hemisphere as the source given its rock was much younger.
He reduced the exact expulsion site where the Black Beauty came from, when something has hit the Martian surface by throwing the rock into space, to an unnamed crater now known as Karratha after a city of the Pilbara region of WA, which has some of the oldest rocks in Earth Formation.
The crater of origin of Black Beauty was found in the southern hemisphere of Mars, which is highlighted in red on this map of the craters of the planet. Credit: Curtin University
Karratha, the crater, is 10 kilometers wide and lies within a larger crater named after another Pilbara town, Dampier.
Dampier crater formed about 4.5 billion years ago, but Black Beauty is believed to have formed when debris from the adjacent Khujirt crater landed 1.5 billion years ago before being launched into space about 5 million years ago. -10 million years.
“All of these configurations to dig up a piece of rock and then eject it into space are pretty rare to get. That’s why we only have one Martian gap on Earth,” Lagain said.
Black Beauty.
“We think this site could actually be the oldest part of Mars’ crust formed, basically 4.5 billion years ago, just after the planet formed.
“It would be very interesting to visit this place.
“On Earth we don’t have such ancient pieces of rock to understand how the Earth evolved. However, on Mars, we get it thanks to Black Beauty.”
Cosmic mineralogist and astrogeologist Gretchen Benedix co-authored the paper and said being able to find exactly where Black Beauty came from was an exciting development.
He said that on Earth we could date back about 4.3 billion years, but there were only about 20 million years between the oldest rock on Mars and when the solar system was formed.
“So we’re on what we think is the beginning, the beginning of the solar system,” Benedix said.
“We have planets forming and there is only a furious and terrible disaster of things happening.
“And so the fact that this thing has crystallized at that time, that helps us understand, when all of this is starting to solidify instead of being out all the time.”
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Benedict said knowing what was happening on Mars helped infer what was happening with the Earth-Moon system at the same time.
“Understanding how other planets evolve and how other planets form and the things that happen there helps us better understand the history of our own planet,” he said.
Curtin researchers will be able to convert their crater algorithm to the Earth’s moon and Mercury in the future to better understand their geological histories.
The supercomputer could also be trained to identify other features on Mars, such as wash canals or volcanoes, and help scientists figure out where the youngest surface on the planet might be.