NASA's rover Spirit has turned its gaze away from the Martian rocks at its wheels and looks skyward in an attempt to spot a meteor shower. Mars is currently passing through debris left by Halley’s comet and the Spirit team hope the rover might spot bright streaks left in the sky as the Red Planet spins through the ghost of the comet's tail. The rover's panoramic camera has so far spotted several streaks in the Martian night sky. However, these may turn out to be the result of cosmic rays – highly energetic particles that zoom from all directions in space – rather than a meteor shower produced by the long-gone comet.

A study of meteorites chipped off the surface of Mars suggests the planet has been frozen for 4 billion years and probably never had the warm wet conditions that could have given rise to life, two researchers said Thursday. Their study of two meteorites that fell to Earth suggests they were never in warm conditions. The report, published in the journal Science, contradicts theories the now-frozen planet may once have been warm enough for life to have arisen.

NASA's Spirit rover photographed a streak of light that was likely part of a martian meteor shower, scientists announced today. The picture is the first of a shooting star above Mars. Further, the flash has been traced back to its parent comet. And now astronomers figure they should be able to forecast martian meteor showers.

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has completed its inspection of “Heat Shield Rock” -- an iron meteorite the robot came across at Meridiani Planum, a cratered flatland that the machine has called home since landing on the red planet over a year ago. The pitted, basketball-size meteorite is mostly made of iron and nickel, as detected by the rover’s set of onboard spectrometers -- devices that map the presence of different elements on the surface of Mars. Meteors, often called “shooting stars” have been seen blazing through the Martian sky by both Opportunity and its sister ship, Spirit, now rolling through the Columbia Hills at Gusev Crater.

The discovery of an iron meteorite sitting on Mars by NASA’s Opportunity rover has kick-started a wide-ranging discussion as to what the find may be telling us about the planet itself, past water conditions there, and just how peppered the red planet might be with the fallen objects. Roughly the size of a basketball, the object is mostly made of iron and nickel, and is the first meteorite of any type ever identified on another planet.

In a stroke of luck, the NASA rover Opportunity has discovered a basketball-size metal meteorite sitting on the surface of Mars, the mission's main scientist said Tuesday. Scientists believe the meteorite might lead to clues about how martian winds are reshaping the planet's surface. Opportunity came upon the meteorite last week while performing other tasks. Tests confirmed it was a nickel-iron meteorite, said Steve Squyres, a Cornell University scientist who is the principal investigator for NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers mission.

Scientists in the department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University have devised a method to precisely date the timing and temperature of a meteorite impact on Mars that led to ejection of a piece of the planet into space and its eventual impact on Earth. Meteorites are the main source of mass exchange between planets and carry with them characteristic clues about the nature and history of the planets or planetesimals where they originated, the impacts that dislodged them, and the time they spent in space. Kyoungwon Kyle Min, postdoctoral fellow in geology, reported an innovation for determining the timing and temperatures of ancient impacts that liberate meteorites from extraterrestrial bodies such as Mars.

The most famous Mars meteorite, the Allen Hills rock with its strange, cylindrical rock segments, may not be the most intriguing. Consider a rock launched from Mars only 700 million years ago called Lafayette. Judging by detailed chemical analysis, the outcome of Lafayette's long journey to Earth points to a past where it might have been altered at the bottom of a salt-water pool. Or at least that conclusion is what many meteor scientists propose to describe what might have landed in North America about three millenia ago.

Iron meteorites may have been responsible for the evolution of life on Earth, according to NASA funded research. In a study to be published shortly in the journal Astrobiology, University of Arizona's Dante Lauretta, assistant professor of planetary sciences, and doctoral candidate Matthew Pasek, suggest that iron meteorites brought enough phosphorus to Earth to give rise to biomolecules which eventually assembled into living, replicating organisms.

A team of NASA-sponsored meteorite hunters has discovered what it believes is an ancient chunk of Mars -- on Earth. The team of Antarctic explorers came across the 1.5-pound black rock last December while scouring for meteorites in the Transantarctic Mountains, about 466 miles from the South Pole. A subsequent analysis by the Smithsonian Institution revealed that the rock's mineralogy and texture are "unmistakably Martian," according to a statement released Wednesday by NASA.

The famous softball-sized meteorite found at Allan Hills in Antarctica continues to spawn debate about its organic vs. inorganic origins. While there is little doubt the meteorite is remarkable at over four and half billion years old and largely undamaged during its fiery terrestrial descent, alternative inorganic hypotheses about its strange interior shapes now has new laboratory evidence.

While rovers and orbiting spacecraft scour Mars searching for clues to its past, researchers have uncovered another piece of the red planet in the most inhospitable place on Earth -- Antarctica. The new specimen was found by a field party from the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) on Dec. 15, 2003, on an ice field in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 750 km (466 miles) from the South Pole. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History involved in classification of Antarctic finds said the mineralogy, texture and the oxidized nature of the rock are unmistakably martian. The new specimen is the seventh recognized member of a group of martian meteorites called the nakhlites, named after the first known specimen that fell in Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911.

Of the many intriguing observations taken by the Mars rovers, one of the most interesting was not of the surrounding geology. Rather, it was an image of the martian atmosphere. Caught in action was something streaking through the sky.

A unique meteorite that fell on a Soviet military base in Yemen in 1980 may have come from one of the moons of Mars. Several meteorites from the Red Planet have been found on Earth, but this could be the only piece of Martian moon rock. Andrei Ivanov, who is based at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow, Russia, spent two decades puzzling over the fist-sized Kaidun meteorite before he decided that it must be a chip off Phobos, the larger of the two Martian moons.

NASA's Opportunity rover has examined an odd volcanic rock on the plains of Mars' Meridiani Planum region with a composition unlike anything seen on Mars before, but scientists have found similarities to meteorites that fell to Earth.