Has Martian dust been brought back to Earth???

Jazza11 (Jeremy) · #1 22-09-2009, 05:12 PM

I wanted to know if Nasa has brought back any samples of Mars dust or rocks???

DavidU (Dave) · #2 22-09-2009, 05:17 PM

Hi Jazza, no mars samples from NASA.
However there is 30 or so meteorites found on earth that came from Mars.
So we kinda do have some samples...............
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/

OneOfOne (Trevor) · #3 23-09-2009, 07:53 AM

I have some pieces of these meteorites myself, as well as meteorites from the Moon and Vesta.

Waxing_Gibbous (Peter) · #4 23-09-2009, 09:16 AM

We evidently have enough of our own and don't require any "foreign" dust, thank you very much!

Ric · #5 23-09-2009, 04:42 PM

How do scientist's determine that a meteorite has come from Vesta or Mars?

That must be an awesome bit of detective work.

renormalised (Carl) · #6 23-09-2009, 05:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ric

How do scientist's determine that a meteorite has come from Vesta or Mars?

That must be an awesome bit of detective work.

They look at the chemical and mineralogical composition of the samples and match them to studies done of those objects using spectrographs and such.

glenc (Glen) · #7 23-09-2009, 06:21 PM

I think so, it landed in Eastern Australia today.