00:03Every 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?
00:19ScientEllet 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. Previous
00:37studies have found that an asteroid would have to hit Mars and create 300,000 times the atmospheric
00:42pressure to turn plagioclase into glassy masculinite, a marker that an asteroid impact occurred, and one
00:49that is found in meteorites from Mars. But using the laboratory blast gun, they were able to transform
00:54the material using only 200,000 times the pressure, meaning asteroid impacts that were only two-thirds
00:59as powerful, could have ejected some of those meteorites. With the researchers explaining
01:03that the more accurately we can characterize the shock pressures experienced by a meteorite,
01:08the more likely it becomes that we can identify the impact crater on Mars from which it originated.
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