Key Points
Of the more than 74,000 known meteorites rocks that fall to Earth from asteroids or planets colliding together only 385 or so stones came from the planet Mars...
The Martian meteorites found on Earth give geologists like me hints about the makeup of the red planet and its history of volcanic activity..
The rather exotically named nakhlite and chassignite meteorites are a group of rocks from Mars that erupted from the same volcanic system some 1.3 billion years ago...
Along with the much more common shergottites, which are also basaltic rocks, and a few other more exotic Martian meteorite types, these categories of meteorite constitute all the rocks researchers possess from the red planet...
These are a diverse and richly complex set of rocks, ranging in age from 175 million years to 2.4 billion years or so.. Studying these meteorites in greater detail will help to prepare the next generation of scientists to analyse rocks collected using the Perseverance Rover for the forthcoming NASA Mars Sample Return mission..
