It might not be a spaceship or intergalactic travel.
But researchers from the University of Alberta (U of A) say they have found the “closest thing to going to Mars.”
Chris Herd, a professor in the U of A Faculty of Science and a curator of the university’s Meteorite Collection, says they think they have found the source impact craters of half of the 10 groups of Martian meteorites, all of which fell on Earth and were studied.
“This will fundamentally change how we study meteorites from Mars,” he said in a news release.
“The idea of taking a group of meteorites that were all blasted at the same time and then doing targeted studies on them to determine where they were prior to being ejected – that to me is the exciting next step.”
The recent study published Friday uses 200 meteorites, grouped based on similarities, from around the world, and traced them back to impact craters within two volcanic regions on Mars called Tharsis and Elysium.
He says the meteorites make their way to Earth when something hits the surface of Mars hard enough for the material to be “blasted off the surface and accelerated fast enough to leave Mars’ gravity.”
It then launches into space and flies into orbit around the sun, which leads to some pieces from them to fall to Earth as meteorites.
The blast itself leaves an impact crater on Mars’ surface, which Herd says has happened 10 times in Mars’ recent history.
“Now, we can group these meteorites by their shared history and then their location on the surface of Mars prior to coming to Earth,” he said.
Herd explains that more knowledge about how and where on Mars those meteorites come from can help researchers give additional insight into the samples already on Earth.
Essentially, he says the ability to explain and position these samples within the “Martian geological record” for the first time “will enable the recalibration of Mars’ chronology,” saying there are implications for the timing, duration and nature of several major events through Mars’ history.
“It is really amazing if you think about it,” Herd said. “It’s the closest thing we can have to actually going to Mars and picking up a rock.”
When it comes to determining if a meteorite sample encountered on Earth is actually from Mars, Herd says scientists discovered a signature, or “fingerprint,” of the Martian atmosphere in the 1980s “that’s trapped inside these rocks.”
He says those include a specific combination of trapped gases in the rock that match the gases in the atmosphere of Mars, which have been measured by the Viking landers in the 1970s.