Sarah Hörst, Assistant Professor of Planetary Science at Johns Hopkins University recently found herself in an interesting situation: she got a chance to hold pieces of the Moon and Mars – on Earth. Wow, what a planetary constellation… She shared her excitement on Twitter:
This is what my face looks like when someone lets me hold a piece of the Moon and Mars at the same time pic.twitter.com/wMN1HhXKpW
— Dr./Prof. Sarah Hörst (@PlanetDr) April 13, 2018
Hörst also took time to answer some of the most common questions:
- The black piece of rock is the Martian one, the gray one is from the Moon.
- We’ve never had a sample return mission from Mars – how come we have rock from there? Well, it landed on Earth after something crashed into Mars and sent rocks flying through space and all the way to our planet.
- But how do we know it is from Mars and not some other place? The chemical composition and isotopes match measurements of Mars from spacecraft we’ve sent there and don’t match anything else.
- You can read more about the Martian meteorites here.
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