A rose-colored meteorite found in the Sahara Desert in 2022 has turned out to be one of the oldest pieces of Mars ever discovered. A NASA-funded team age-dated its minerals and concluded that the rock, weighing about 800 grams, formed more than 4.1 billion years ago, making it an exceptional window into the Red Planet's earliest times.

The find arrived with no known provenance: when it turned up in the Sahara, no one knew how long it had been there or where it came from. Dating the meteorite's minerals was the key to identifying its Martian origin and placing it in a particularly early era of the planet's geological history, predating most of the surface that NASA's rovers observe today.

At nearly a pound in mass, the meteorite offers a substantial amount of material to study the composition and thermal history of early Mars. The oldest known Martian rocks are scarce, and every new sample of this age allows researchers to test models of crust formation, mantle evolution and the conditions that may once have supported liquid water.

The NASA-funded researchers continue to analyze the sample to extract more information about conditions on Mars when the solar system was less than 500 million years old. Understanding this period is essential to reconstructing how the planet went from a geologically active world to the frozen desert we know today.