The team believes it's pinpointed the origin of a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite found on Earth. It is the world's oldest Martian igneous rock, known as Black Beauty or NWA 7034, and has intrigued scientists since it was discovered in 2011.

A modern supercomputer would not have been able to find NWA 7034's origin point, much less narrow it down to just 17 Martian impact craters that meet the size, age, and geochemical criteria that indicate a match. 

The idea is to find a crater on Mars that was the result of something crashing into the Red Planet, a smash that caused a bunch of rock to sputter out, and some of that rock would have come to Earth as Black Beauty.

A team from Curtin University in Oz, working with the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Australia, determined that Black Beauty's ejection point can only be found in the southern hemisphere of Mars.

Their findings indicate that Black Beauty's crater was the third in a series created by an asteroid hitting Mars about 1.5 billion years ago. Several hundred kilometers from the Khurjirt crater, rocks from the Khujirt crater rained down on the Martian surface, forming the Dampier crater.

A meteoroid that eventually became Black Beauty struck Dampier between five and ten million years ago, creating another crater. The crater was named Karratha after an Australian mining town of the same name, according to lead author Dr. Anthony Lagain. 

The Pilbara region is home to the oldest rocks on Earth, so I named it Karratha', Lagain told The Guardian. Researchers said Black Beauty's ancient origin point holds insights into the planetary formation, due to its age.

A unique record of early crustal processes was preserved in the area where Black Beauty was formed. It 'represents the differentiated primordial Martian crust quickly after the planet was formed,' according to the team.

The Sirenum province of Terra Cimmeria 'will prove a superb landing site for a future mission to unravel the first tens of millions of years of the history of Mars and all terrestrial planets.' 

As for whether or not a future Mars mission will target Karratha, Pawsey said that work will continue based on the same technology used by the Black Beauty team to choose impact sites for other asteroids regardless of the future Mars mission being aimed at the region.

We have already found around 300 Martian meteorites on Earth, and 90 million spots associated with Martian impacts have been identified. Therefore, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.