Feb 02, 2015 01:58 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Beneath the dusty surface that gives Mars its "Red Planet" nickname is a mysterious crust that just became a little clearer thanks to a new study of a Martian meteorite.

Published in the journal Icarus, the study is a spectroscopic look at the "Black Beauty" meteorite first discovered in 2011 in the Moroccan Desert. Kevin Cannon, a Brown University graduate student, served as lead author on the paper with Jack Mustard, a Brown colleague, and Carl Agee, of the University of New Mexico.

"Other techniques give us measurements of a dime-sized spot," Cannon said in a press release. "What we wanted to do was get an average for the entire sample. That overall measurement was what ended up matching the orbital data.

"This is showing that if you went to Mars and picked up a chunk of crust, you'd expect it to be heavily beat up, battered, broken apart and put back together."

The researchers compared the meteorite with areas of Mars' surface where the red surface dust is thinnest, exposing the rocky crust. Cannon said the two are a match, that Black Beauty represents the rocky crust's "bulk background."

"Most samples from Mars are somewhat similar to spacecraft measurements," Mustard said in the release, "but annoyingly different."

Black Beauty was aged at 4.4 billion years old and the study authors say there is enough evidence to definitively say the meteorite is a piece of Mars' rocky crust.

"Mars is punctured by over 400,000 impact craters greater than 1 km in diameter," researchers wrote in the study. "Because brecciation is a natural consequence of impacts, it is expected that material similar to NWA 7034 has accumulated on Mars over time."

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