A roasted rock bought in Morocco has added spice to Mars's past. Charred by its fall to Earth, this chunk of the Red Planet is loaded with water, suggesting that we may need to revise our picture of when Mars dried out. Other Mars meteorites have had unusual oxygen isotopes that gave away their origin. But their minerals did not match surface rocks studied by Mars rovers and orbiters, hinting the meteorites came from deeper down. The new meteorite, dubbed Northwest Africa 7034, closely resembles rocks that rovers have studied and is likely to be the first piece of Martian crust found on Earth, says Carl Agee of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (Science, doi.org/ j5b). The rock, 2.1 billion years old, also holds many more waterbearing minerals than other finds, suggesting Mars's surface stayed moist longer than we thought.
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