STARSET_MirrorWe Now Know the Exact Crater That Spat Out a Famous Martian Meteorite
Using a supercomputer, a team of scientists recently determined the exact crater that expelled rock from Mars in the ancient past—a rock that wound up crashing into Earth.
最近，一组科学家利用一台超级计算机确定了古代从火星上驱逐岩石——一种最终坠入地球的岩石的确切陨石坑。
The rocky rejectamenta is formally named NWA 7034, but it’s popularly known as Black Beauty; its remains were first discovered in Western Sahara in 2011. The meteorite remnant is important because it contains some of the most ancient igneous rock from Mars, dating to about 4.48 billion years ago.
The rocky rejectamenta的正式名称为NWA 7034，但它通常被称为“黑皮佳人”；其遗迹于2011年首次在西撒哈拉被发现。陨石遗迹很重要，因为它包含一些来自火星的最古老的火成岩，可追溯到约44.8亿年前。
A team of researchers recently scrutinized the space rock to deduce its precise origin on Mars, which in turn revealed a record of ancient Martian geology. The team’s research is published today in Nature Communications.
一组研究人员最近仔细检查了太空岩石，以推断其在火星上的确切起源，这反过来又揭示了古代火星地质的记录。该团队的研究成果今天发表在《自然通讯》上。
“For the first time, we know the geological context of the only brecciated Martian sample available on Earth, 10 years before the NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is set to send back samples collected by the Perseverance rover currently exploring the Jezero crater,” said Anthony Lagain, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Australia, in a university release.
澳大利亚科廷大学的行星科学家安东尼·拉根在一份大学新闻稿中说：“在美国宇航局的火星样本返回任务将返回目前正在探索杰泽罗陨石坑的‘毅力号’火星探测器收集的样本的十年前，我们首次了解了地球上唯一可用的角砾状火星样本的地质背景。”。
Martian geology is investigated from a distance. We have rovers on the ground, like Perseverance and Curiosity, which are equipped with instruments that can reveal Martian lithochemistry (the chemical composition of its rocks). There’s also the Mars InSight lander, which can investigate the planet’s seismic activity, though its digging instrument failed to get a foothold inside the planet. But humankind has yet to collect rock samples from Mars for up-close study, so the 0.7-pound (320-gram) Black Beauty is a boon for investigating early Martian history. (Jezero, the crater Perseverance is investigating, is about 3.5 billion years old—coincidentally, about the same age as the earliest signs of life on Earth.)
火星地质是从远处调查的。我们在火星地表上有像“毅力号”和“好奇号”这样的漫游者，它们配备了能够揭示火星岩石化学（岩石的化学成分）的仪器。还有火星洞察着陆器，它可以调查行星的地震活动，尽管它的挖掘仪器未能在行星内部找到立足点。但是人类还没有从火星上采集岩石样本进行近距离研究，因此0.7磅（320克）的黑皮佳人对研究火星早期历史是一个福音。（“毅力号”正在调查的陨石坑Jezero大约有35亿年的历史，巧合的是，它的年龄与地球上最早的生命迹象差不多。）
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