00:00Every year, thousands of meteorites fall to Earth, and over the course of many years,
00:07experts have recovered a lot of them. Now, scientists say 188 of them originated on Mars,
00:13raising the question, how did they make the more than 166 million mile transit to our planet?
00:19Science Alert reports that astronomers once believed that asteroid impacts with planets
00:22had to be extremely powerful in order to eject planetary material. Now, they say that's likely
00:27not the case, and that much lesser impacts can probably achieve this. Researchers from Caltech
00:32did this by simulating asteroid impacts on Mars in a lab using a blast gun they developed.
00:37Previous studies have found that an asteroid would have to hit Mars and create 300,000 times the
00:42atmospheric pressure to turn plagioclase into glassy masculinite, a marker that an asteroid
00:47impact occurred, and one that is found in meteorites from Mars. But using the laboratory blast gun,
00:52they were able to transform the material using only 200,000 times the pressure.
00:57Meaning asteroid impacts that were only two-thirds as powerful could have ejected some of those
01:01meteorites, with the researchers explaining that the more accurately we can characterize
01:05the shock pressures experienced by a meteorite, the more likely it becomes that we can identify
01:09the impact crater on Mars from which it originated.
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