Chemical analysis of meteorite suggests life on Mars WASHINGTON - A meteorite that fell to Earth after possibly being ejected from Mars may bear chemical evidence that life once existed on that planet, NASA officials said Tuesday. The officials confirmed that a report in Space News, a weekly publication on the space program, is "essentially correct" about the meteorite containing possible indications of life on Mars. Another source said the study found traces of magnetite, a mineral that can be associated with bacterial action, but that processes other than life can also produce magnetite. NASA spokesman James Hartsfield of the Johnson Space Center in Houston confirmed that research sponsored by JSC concluded that a meteorite called ALH 84001 is 4 billion to 4.5 billion years old and that the stony object is thought to have been blasted away from Mars when asteroids battered the red planet. He confirmed that some researchers studying the meteorite concluded it bore chemical evidence of past biological activity on Mars. Don Savage, a spokesman at NASA's Washington headquarters, also confirmed the report was correct. A source at Science magazine said the publication had received a paper describing the study and that the paper had been peer-reviewed and prepared for publication. Earlier research has confirmed that material has fallen to Earth from both Mars and the Moon after being knocked into space by impacts. Some of the material is thought to have drifted in space for millions of years before reaching Earth. By The Associated Press