Posted by tourdemars to Meteorites at November 12, 2002 12:00 PM

Martian meteorites can reach Earth much more easily than first suspected, according to a new U.S.-Russian study, strengthening the case for theories that life on Earth may have originated on the red planet. High resolution computer simulations by Dr James Head of the University of Arizona in the U.S. and Professor Boris Ivanov of the Russian Academy of Sciences has found that even small impacts on Mars – creating craters as small as three kilometres across – would have ejected kilometre-sized fragments of Mars into space.