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    "headline": "Rose-colored Sahara meteorite is a piece of Mars over 4.1 billion years old; water altered it back then",
    "description": "Found on a Mali salt plain in 2022, the 800-gram Teghaza 001 is one of the three oldest Martian meteorites known, and its zircons point to a lively early water cycle.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-01T00:08:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "Science",
    "keywords": "Mars, meteorites, NASA, planetary science, Sahara",
    "articleBody": "A pinkish stone picked up on a salt plain in Mali in 2022 is a fragment of Mars that took shape more than 4.1 billion years ago. That age puts Teghaza 001 among the three most ancient Martian meteorites ever identified on Earth, out of roughly 435 known to have come from the Red Planet, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team behind it published its first full description of the rock in the journal Science on Thursday, October 29. Lead author Yang Liu, a planetary sample expert at JPL in Southern California, said: “It was only after we started looking closely that we realized this meteorite is really unique.” She added: “One of the paper’s reviewers called it a Rosetta Stone for Mars.” How a 2-pound stone was dated The meteorite weighs about 800 grams, a little under 2 pounds, and is named after the Teghaza salt flat where it turned up. Researchers at the University of New Mexico first flagged it as Martian by its oxygen isotopes, the chemical fingerprint that separates rocks from different worlds. At first glance it looked like a shergottite, the most common class of Mars rock found on Earth. Liu nearly declined to examine it. When she did, she found odd textures, unfamiliar minerals and tiny zircon crystals, which are prized by geologists because they lock in a record of when a rock formed. The dating itself used a technique developed by Francois Tissot’s group at Caltech. Instead of dissolving a whole sample, the in-situ rubidium-strontium method reads single mineral grains on the surface of a chip smaller than a fingernail, so most of the rare rock survives for later work. “Right now, we are one of very few labs in the world able to perform this kind of age-dating, and the first to date such an ancient Martian meteorite,” Tissot said. The results showed that water on Mars altered the rock around 4.1 billion years ago. Because the alteration came after the rock crystallized, the stone itself must be older still. Why it matters Most Martian meteorites tell a narrow story. Teghaza 001 carries a mix of igneous minerals that records crust forming from cooling magma and then being reworked by water below the surface. Its mineralogy matches what the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has mapped in the heavily cratered southern highlands, and the team lists 13 spots on Mars whose chemistry fits. “This is really our first piece of Martian crust from a part of Mars we’ve never had a sample of before,” said second author Lee Saper, now at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It records interactions of water and rock and maybe even an imprint of the Martian atmosphere as it was losing water.” Clues in the oxygen isotopes, texture and chemistry point to a busier water cycle on young Mars than many models assume. A separate paper on the same rock, published in Science Advances in June, focused on its water content. How it compares with the famous Antarctic rock The best-known ancient Mars rock is Allan Hills 84001, found in Antarctica on December 27, 1984. It weighed 1.93 kilograms when found and is thought to have crystallized about 4.091 billion years ago, according to its reference entry. In 1996 it made worldwide headlines over structures some researchers read as microfossils, a claim most of the field later rejected. Size: Teghaza 001 at 800 grams is about 41% of the Antarctic rock’s 1,930.9 grams (800 / 1,930.9 = 0.414). Makeup: Allan Hills 84001 is almost entirely one mineral; Teghaza 001 holds a range of volcanic minerals, including zircons. Age: both sit near the 4.1 billion-year mark, which is what makes the pair so rare among Martian meteorites. Put simply, the new find offers a broader sample of the same early era from what appears to be a different patch of the planet. Limits No one can say exactly where on Mars the rock was blasted from; the 13 candidate sites are matches, not a launch point. Like every Martian meteorite, it was thrown off the surface by an impact and spent time in space and in a desert before reaching a lab, so scientists must separate Martian signals from later changes. The formation age is also a minimum: the 4.1 billion-year figure dates the water alteration, not the first cooling of the rock. The authors see the two 2026 papers as an opening. “We’ve only scratched the surface,” Liu said. Further reading NASA JPL: NASA-funded Study Details One of Oldest Mars Meteorites Ever Found Wikipedia: Allan Hills 84001 Image: Vahe Martirosyan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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