A rose-coloured rock from the Sahara is one of the oldest pieces of Mars ever found — 4.1 billion years old

It weighs about 800 grams, blushed rose-pink, and it fell from another world. Teghaza 001, a meteorite found in the Sahara Desert in 2022, has been dated by NASA-funded researchers to more than 4.1 billion years — one of the three oldest Mars rocks known on Earth, from an era when the young planet still had flowing water. Published in Science, the analysis found mineral traces of that ancient water altering the rock, and narrowed its birthplace to 13 candidate sites on Mars. Most Martian meteorites are hundreds of millions of years old; this one is a dispatch from the planet's childhood.