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Another Mars Rock Found in Antarctica

Posted on: Friday, 23 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

Scientists hunting for meteorites on the frozen glaciers of Antarctica have discovered a wrinkled black rock they say could only have originated from Mars - quite probably blasted from the surface by an asteroid that crashed onto that planet millions of years ago.

The find could resurrect a major controversy that erupted eight years ago when a NASA research team contended that another martian meteorite bore distinct evidence of fossil microbes. The dispute hasn't completely subsided.

The latest martian object - containing trapped samples of the martian atmosphere - was found in December in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, about 466 miles from the South Pole, by a field party of explorers from Case Western Reserve University.

Their expedition, the U.S. Antarctic Meteorite Program, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Smithsonian Institution.

As soon as a specialized group of experts had determined the rock's nature and origin, the find was reported Tuesday on the Internet, so scientists all over the world could request tiny samples of the meteorite to examine in their own laboratories.

The martian meteorite that caused the scientific furor in 1996 was named ALH 84001, for Antarctica's Allan Hills, where it was discovered in 1884.

In August 1996, David McKay and his colleagues at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston said that chemical and microscopic signs of microbe-shaped objects inside the meteorite proved that life - at least once - must have existed on Mars.

By now, the scientific community is virtually unanimous in rejecting McKay's assertion, insisting there are plenty of non- biological ways that the strange shapes and chemistry of the Allen Hills meteorite could have fooled McKay.

In a telephone interview, however, McKay told the San Francisco Chronicle he is "extremely excited by the discovery" of the new meteorite and is already preparing his application for a sample of the rock to seek more evidence of ancient martian life.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History who have examined the newfound meteorite say it weighs about a pound and a half and appears to be a black crystalline material dotted with many small pits known as vugs - the same sort of tiny pockmarks that one of the Mars rovers has found in martian rock.

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