When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration declared last month that the evidence for water on Mars was mounting, Mike Moore was probably one of the least surprised people in the world. Thirty years ago Moore discovered what he came to believe is a meteor from Mars, a claim that science has not accepted. Among many subsequent studies and tests on the object, he found a small rock inside a soluble mantle of dirt.

Two French scientists said on Saturday they believed they had discovered a rare meteorite from Mars which could shed light on the red planet's geological makeup and volcanic activity. A team led by Carine Bidaut and Bruno Fectay found two chunks of meteorite weighing 414 and 383 grammes (14.6 and 15.5 ounces) respectively in the Atlas mountains of southern Morocco in January and March 2001.

The newly renovated Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites is reopening Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History, allowing visitors to again come in contact with objects as old as the sun. "We display some of the first rocks formed in the solar system," said Denton Ebel, curator of the hall.

For anyone who's ever wanted a souvenir from Mars without the hassles of traveling there, here's their chance. A Lincoln company is auctioning off part of the famous Mars meteorite Zagami, which fell to Earth Oct. 3, 1962, in central Nigeria. Bids for the fragment, which weighs about 6.6 ounces and is about the size of a soda can, begin at $450,000 when the online auction starts Sept. 5 on the Internet site eBay.

A fist sized chunk of Mars rock will be flown to Birmingham next month amid tight security to give that other world feel to the city's astronomy week celebrations. The piece of Martian meteorite, insured for £25,000, is to be delivered to Soho House Museum for the Destination Mars exhibition for National Astronomy Week starting on August 23.

Six years ago, Ben Weiss spent all night slicing the oldest rock on Earth into pieces the size of a child's fingernail. The precious slivers of dark brown meteorite offered Weiss, then a first-year Caltech graduate student, a chance to delve into the most hotly contested debate in geology: whether a potato-size piece of Mars blasted from the red planet 15 million years ago carried remnants of Martian life to Earth.

Today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston Dr Jim Head presented new results to suggest that about one rock from Mars falls on Earth each month. Head’s work involves calculating exactly how often asteroids and comets impact with the planet Mars and how many martian rocks these collisions blast up into space. He then models the paths of these little fragments of the red planet, under the influence of the combined gravity of the planets and Sun to see how many and how often such martian meteorites fall to Earth.

Oscar Monnig used to pay anyone who brought him a meteorite. This week, the new Monnig Meteorite Gallery opens on the campus of Texas Christian University. The museum showcases decades of work by the Fort Worth businessman, who died in 1999. There is one meteorite from the moon, and three from Mars. Also, a basketball-sized chunk of the rock that blasted Meteor Crater in northern Arizona. And a piece of the meteorite that crumpled a car's trunk in Peekskill, N.Y., in 1992.

Pieces of what an auction organizer called some of the most exotically expensive real estate on the planet were offered to bidders. A tiny piece of a Martian meteorite weighing 0.44 gram was bought Sunday for $1,000 by an Internet bidder who was not identified.

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.

Every month, on average, a rock from Mars lands on Earth. Most are never found, but those that have been picked up suggest that the theory for how they get here – having been booted from the Red Planet by very large asteroid impacts – is not fully accurate. Now a new computer simulation appears to solve the puzzle by showing that relatively small collisions can do the trick.

The Western Sahara, a fertile hunting ground for enthusiasts seeking meteorites, offered up two rare Martian rocks in the past few months. The discoveries bring the total of all known Martian meteorites to twenty-six. (Meteorites are smallish rocks from space that fall to Earth. If they don't impact, they are meteors.) Of the two, one is a rock that is unique to Mars, called nakhlite. Nakhlite is composed of pyroxine, a mineral common to Earth rocks, but a nakhlite's ratio of calcium, magnesium and iron in its pyroxine is what makes it unique.

Separate nomadic bands in northwest Africa have discovered two martian meteorites, bringing the total of identified red planet rocks to 26, planet scientists announced this week. One of the specimens consists of two fragments that scientists speculate broke apart thousands of years ago during natural erosion on Earth, but no one knows for sure when they split. "Maybe they were kicked apart by a camel," joked Tony Irving, a University of Washington planetary geologist who studied the stones.

A meteorite that fell to Earth from Mars purported to offer evidence of past Martian biology has fallen from grace. That's the assertion from two scientists who say the rock's strongest link to life -- as claimed by other researchers -- has broken down. In December 1984, ALH 84001 -- often called the "Mars rock" -- was picked up in Antarctica by a National Science Foundation-sponsored meteorite-hunting expedition. Tossed into space by an asteroid or comet that hit Mars billions of years past, the tiny piece of rock eventually found its way to Earth. It is believed to have landed in Antarctica some 13,000 years ago. In August 1996, a science team led by NASA Johnson Space Center experts declared that they had uncovered evidence inside ALH 84001 for Martian biological activity. Ultra-small and segmented, rod-shaped structures were read by the team as the fossil leftovers of Martian microbial life. Since that time, the diminutive four and three-quarter pounds (1.93 kilograms) of potato-shaped Mars rock has weighed heavy on minds of scientists around the world.

Mars has always been a provocateur. The planet has a long history of making us uneasy, from the portents of violence our ancestors associated with its red glow, to our science-fiction nightmares of malicious, technologically superior alien invaders. And Mars is still stirring things up in the scientific community. For several years now, there has been an on-going debate as to whether a meteorite from Mars contains the fossilized remnants of microbial life. Some scientists think we no longer have to wonder about whether there is other life in the universe; we have the remains of tiny Martian cousins in our laboratories at this very moment. Others remain skeptical, claiming that every structure and chemical in the meteorite could have been formed by natural processes that have nothing to do with life, like chemical weathering and heating. Despite the controversy, the Martian Meteorite debate has already taught us a lot about what kind of questions to ask the next time we get our hands on a sample of Martian soil, as well as shown us how little we understand about the threshold of life itself.

Following years of rigorous study, the inside story of whether meteorite ALH 84001 – the so-called "Mars rock" – harbors evidence for past Martian biology remains steeped in debate. It was a NASA-led research team that announced in August 1996 that the potato-shaped meteorite found in Antarctica might sport fossilized bacteria. They argued that "lines of evidence" pointed to the likelihood that a primitive form of microscopic life that flourished on the red planet three billion years ago had been found. Now, fast-forward from 1996 to five-and-a-half years later. It turns out that rock-solid evidence is hard to come by.

All last week, attendees at the 33rd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, looked forward to one of the meeting's final sessions, whose main attraction was the controversial 4½-billion-year-old Martian meteorite known as ALH 84001. For years David S. McKay (NASA/Johnson Space Center) and his coauthors have maintained that this celebrated stone contains strong evidence — but not proof — of fossilized microbial life.

Exploring the coldest and hottest places on Earth, space rock hunters have found five new meteorites from Mars, bringing the number of known stones from the red planet to 24. Planet scientists express keen interest in rare martian meteorites, some of which have offered tantalizing clues about whether the planet once possessed oceans or life. The recent cache actually includes six specimens, but two are presumed to be chunks from the same meteorite. One of the pair weighs in at 30 pounds (13.7 kg), the second-largest Mars meteorite fragment ever recovered, NASA scientists said this week.

University of Hawaii geologist Linda Martel, who wanted to be an astronaut as a little girl, will pursue her fascination with space in search of meteorites during a seven-week expedition in Antarctica. "It's like a field trip to the moon and asteroids," she said. "I picture this as being in a space outpost." An educational specialist in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, Martel is scheduled to leave tomorrow to join nine other scientists on this year's Antarctic Search for Meteorites team. The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Smithsonian Institution sponsor the annual expedition to search for clues to the origins of the solar system, planets and possible life on Mars.

These days, it seems like scientists are searching everywhere for water on Mars. Geologists Timothy Grove of MIT and Harry McSween, Jr. of the University of Tennessee have been looking for Martian water right here on Earth. The scientists’ report in the January 25th issue of Nature proposes that volcanic magma rising to the surface of Mars contained water. Some rocks formed by volcanic activity were then ejected from Mars, becoming meteorites, and wound up here on Earth. They have since been analyzed for their mineral content and evidence of water.

Geologists from Bern University and from the Natural History Museum Bern have found more than 180 meteorites in Oman in January/February 2001. The most exciting find is a piece of Mars rock. This meteorite just received its name: Sayh al Uhaymir 094. Contrary to other finds of Mars meteorites in deserts, this meteorite is fully available to science. Detailed investigations are currently under way at Bern University and at collaborating institutions.

The new meteorite was named Sayh al Uhaymir 094 after the region of desert where the team found it and more than 180 other meteorites. The team, in a statement, said they were certain it would contribute to rapidly growing knowledge of the planet. Interest increased in 1996 after a Martian meteorite found near the South Pole, known as Allen Hills 84001, showed possible remnants of life. But such arguments "are hardly taken as solid evidence today," the research team said. Most earlier meteorites from Mars were found in the Antarctic before scientists turned their attention to deserts in recent years.

A fist-sized meteorite, one of only 18 rocks on Earth known to have come from Mars, has been found by Swiss scientists in the Oman desert -- a prize discovery that could help determine if the planet ever sustained life. Scientists at the University of Bern announced the find Friday and said they are just beginning to examine the meteorite. Most of the other 17 Martian rocks have been snapped up by collectors, they said, so few are fully available for study.

A meteorite found in the Western Sahara may contain water that could have come from below the surface of Mars, French researchers say. Discovered last December, meteorite NWA 817 weighs 104 grammes (three and a half ounces). It is the fourth Martian meteorite to be classified as a nakhlite because of its distinctive mineral composition.

A meteorite found in the western Sahara contains water that may have come from below the surface of Mars, French researchers said Tuesday. The rock, weighing 104 grammes (three and a half ounces), was discovered by French meteorite hunters last December.

Thieves may be stealing meteorites to order to feed a growing international trade, a BBC 5Live investigation has revealed. Collectors are willing to pay vast sums for rare fragments of rock from Mars or the moon and there is increasing concern that thieves are now stealing them at their behest. Meteorites, rock or metal fragments that have fallen to a planet's surface from space, have long been valued by scientists. But now they are voraciously sought after by collectors and traders.

Researchers have discovered two new examples of the rarest space rocks found on Earth: meteorites from the moon and Mars. The two rocks are the 15th and 17th meteorites to be found from the moon and Mars, respectively, making them the least common among the estimated 22,000 meteorites discovered on this planet. News of the discoveries was announced this month and will be reported in the July 2001 bulletin of the Meteoritical Society, an international organization devoted to the study of extraterrestrial material.