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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