Martian meteorite touches down at the University of Glasgow

After hundreds of thousands of years drifting in space, a piece of the rocky surface of Mars has made its way into the hands of scientists at the University of Glasgow. Researchers based at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) in East Kilbride have taken delivery of a 0.2-gram fragment of a Martian meteorite which fell to Earth in Morocco last year. They will use cutting-edge mass spectrometer technology to help determine how long it spent in space. The meteorite, named 'Tissint' after the area of Morocco where it landed, is one of just 61 Martian meteorites to have been found on Earth. They were blasted from the face of Mars many thousands of years ago by impacts of several massive asteroids, and travelled through space before crashing down on our planet. Tissint was acquired by the Natural History Museum, London, in February and small pieces of it are being allocated to universities across the UK. The Martian meteorites which have been discovered on Earth each come from three different areas of the planet and are classified as nakhlites, shergottites and chassignites.