The Tissint Mars meteorite "egg"
SCIENTISTS claim this egg-shaped object is the final proof of life on Mars after finding it inside a meteorite from the Red Planet.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted they could only have been produced by living organisms.
He added that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.
Prof Wickramasinghe, 72 — famous for controversial ideas such as that the flu virus and even life itself was brought to our planet by comets — said: "It is impossible to understand how carbon-rich particles of such uniform sizes and shapes got inside a rocky matrix if they are not relics of some algal species.
"Tissint was collected weeks after it fell, and terrestrial contamination seems unlikely. In any case the structures we found were on newly fractured surfaces, from the interior of the meteorite."
The meteorite was named after the village where it came down in the Sahara desert in Morocco last July.
Preliminary SEM/EDAX studies of the Tissint meteorite shows projections of interior spherical globules rich in C and O. Such concentrations of carbonaceous material in a matrix of mineral grains poses a mystery if biological processes are excluded. They are consistent with remnants of biological structures, thus supporting earlier similar claims for the Mars meteorite ALH84001..
Key Words: Meteorites, Mars meteorite, panspermia, exobiology
The Tissint meteorite, identified as a meteorite from Mars, fell onto the Morrocan desert some 30 miles south of the village of Tissint on June 18, 2011. Shattered pieces of the meteorite were recovered in October 2011, and is only just coming to be analysed and studied. A thick fusion crust that surrounds the meteorite fragments give confidence in the assertion that the interior material is pristine and uncontaminated. Its mineralogic characterisation as olivine-phyric shergottite of Martian origin appears to be well accepted, with a most likely origin in a relatively young lava regolith that solidified 400-500 million years ago. The meteorite has been found to contain pockets of Martian atmosphere which also confirms its Martian origin.
Key Words: Meteorites, Mars meteorite, panspermia, exobiology
The Tissint meteorite, identified as a meteorite from Mars, fell onto the Morrocan desert some 30 miles south of the village of Tissint on June 18, 2011. Shattered pieces of the meteorite were recovered in October 2011, and is only just coming to be analysed and studied. A thick fusion crust that surrounds the meteorite fragments give confidence in the assertion that the interior material is pristine and uncontaminated. Its mineralogic characterisation as olivine-phyric shergottite of Martian origin appears to be well accepted, with a most likely origin in a relatively young lava regolith that solidified 400-500 million years ago. The meteorite has been found to contain pockets of Martian atmosphere which also confirms its Martian origin.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted they could only have been produced by living organisms.
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