Discovery of the Allan Hills 84001

Allan Hills 84001 is a meteorite from Mars, recovered from the Allan Hills region of Antarctica by a team searching for meteorites on the ice. It is a rock about 4.1 billion years old, among the oldest Martian rocks known, and was blasted from the planet by an impact millions of years ago before landing on Earth in Antarctica. In 1996 a team of NASA scientists announced that it contained features that might be evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars, including carbonate globules and tiny structures. The claim was widely debated, and most scientists now think non-biological processes can explain the features.

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