Supercomputer Helps Locate Home of 4 Billion-Year-Old Martian Meteorite

Scientists have finally pinpointed exactly where one of the red planet’s most famous, and ancient, castaways once called home. 

Using reams of image data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Pawsey Supercomputer, an international team of researchers has sifted through close to 100-million crater candidates to find the home of a peculiar meteorite called Black Beauty.

At nearly 4.5 billion-years-old, Black Beauty –or NWA 7034, officially– is the oldest Martian meteorite on Earth and a time capsule of Martian history. By studying this meteorite, researchers hope to not only reveal details about its own evolutionary past but also about the history of Earth’s crust that has been lost with the movement of tectonic plates. This work was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Anthony Lagain is a research fellow at the University of Curtin in Perth, Australia and the first author on the new paper tracing Black Beauty’s origins. Lagain told Motherboard in an email that even though the Pawsey Supercomputer played a huge role in speeding up their search, this discovery is still many, many years in the making.

Lagain said one thing that kept researchers “from precisely locating the meteorite's source was simply the lack of knowledge on… composition, age, magnetic properties, geological history of the rock, etc.”

More than ten years after Black Beauty was first discovered in the Sahara in 2011, researchers have now determined key characteristics that set it apart from the crowd. Lagain and colleagues used machine learning to help them match these unique characteristics to a number of known Martian craters. In particular, Black Beauty was found to have high concentrations of thorium and potassium and is the only Martian meteorite to demonstrate magnetism.

“This knowledge is very important because once the crater candidates are identified, the next thing to do is to compare the properties of the terrain around each crater candidate,” Lagain said, “and finally hope to get a match!”

In 2021, Lagain and colleagues used the Pawsey Supercomputer to evaluate 94 million impact craters on the Martian surface that could be likely candidates for meteorite ejections. This process took the supercomputer only 24 hours, but Lagain says it would’ve taken a standard computer “centuries” to crunch the image data that was 5 terabytes each. 

In their latest paper, Lagain and colleagues have run Pawsey again, this time focusing on 19 likely candidates to determine that Black Beauty was ejected 5-10 million years ago during the formation of a crater called Karratha in the southern region of Terra Cimmeria-Sirenum.

The name of this crater is one that Lagain actually proposed to the International Astronomical Union himself during this research in honor of an Australian town, and one which he says shares an unlikely commonality with the Martian locale.

“Karratha is actually located near the oldest rock ever dated on Earth which makes a nice parallel with the oldest Martian minerals ever dated,” he said.

Now that Black Beauty’s hometown has been identified, researchers hope that visiting the region with a future mission to Mars might be in the cards next to learn even more.

“Sending future missions in this identified region would enable scientists to explore if Mars, 4.53 billions years ago, had a crust comparable to Iceland as we observe on Earth today,” Lagain said. “Observing such a setting in extremely ancient terrains on Mars is a window into the ancient Earth that we lost a long time ago.”