Oldest known Mars rock is a ‘Rosetta stone’ for the Red Planet’s watery past
In 2022 a group of nomadic meteorite hunters discovered a strange stone in the Sahara Desert. Called Teghaza 001, initial analysis by experts showed it was a meteorite from Mars. Now new research reveals it's the oldest ever found, and it's revealing more about the Red Planet's complex history. Scientists fortunate enough to get their hands on samples of the space rock have been analyzing tiny pieces of Teghaza for years to better understand exactly what it is and when it formed. The new paper, published today in Science, identifies it as a piece of Mars's crust that's at least 4.1 billion years old, from a time when that world was warmer, wetter and more Earth-like. "We're holding a piece of a rock that's dated even before the oldest Earth rock—a piece of Mars that's so ancient, it existed when life had just started on Earth," says Yang Liu, lead author of the study and a planetary…