A team of scientists from Brown University (USA) has discovered, thanks to a new analysis of a rock found a few years ago in the desert of Morocco, that “Black Beauty” or “Black Beauty” , as it is known This rock was once part of the great plains of Martian crust that are exhibited among the sand and that are precisely those that form a large part of the soil of our neighboring planet Mars. In fact, as scientists explain to the journal Icarus , “most of the rocks on the surface of Mars probably look a lot like Black Beauty: dark, confusing and beautiful.”
Spectroscopic analyzes of Martian rock since 2011 have confirmed measurements made in the black plains of Mars, where the layer of red sand that covers the planet is so thin that it exposes the rocks below.
According to study leader Kevin Cannon, ” Black Beauty is a representative sample of the rock bottom that makes up a good part of the surface of the Red Planet.” It contains components of sedimentary origin that coincide with the chemical signal of other rocks analyzed on Mars by the different space missions that have crossed the reddish surface of Mars and it is the first fragment of Martian crust located on our planet.
The black plains of Mars, which have not yet been “colonized” by Earth’s rovers, are areas with very little dust. Now we also know that the bare rocks that dress this location are like the rock “Black Beauty” and that they correspond to the same types of rocks that remain hidden under a thick layer of red sand in most of the planet.
“Mars is riddled with more than 400,000 craters larger than one kilometer and since the breaches are a natural consequence of impacts, we can be sure that materials similar to NWA 7034 (” Black Beauty “) have been accumulating in large quantities in Mars over time, ”Cannon clarifies.
