A team of scientists has established a whole new class of
meteorites that seems to have come from Mars' crust, based on a
rare sample from 2.1 billion years ago. The newly analyzed
meteorite has more water than any other Martian meteorite that
we know of, by a magnitude of 10, said Carl Agee, lead study
author and director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the
University of New Mexico. Agee and colleagues published their
analysis of the meteorite in the journal Science Express. "There
are thousands and thousands of meteorites, and so far this is
the only one like it," Agee said. This is a volcanic rock that
was probably part of an eruption, and interacted with water to
the extent that some water got incorporated into the structure
of the minerals, Agee said. "That's why we're able to see it
after a couple of billion years," he said. The precise source of
the water in the meteorite is unknown. It could have come from a
lake or stream, or ground water that a volcano intruded into,
Agee said. Alternatively, the