A 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite found on Earth may have come from a part of Mars, an international team has found.

Scientists have been fascinated by the rock since its discovery in 2011 because it is the oldest igneous rock found on Mars. 

Without modern supercomputing, finding NWA 7034's origin point would not have been possible, because the algorithm narrowed Black Beauty's origins down from 90 million Martian impact craters to only 17 that met the size, age, and geochemical requirements to match.

Black Beauty was a rock that came to Earth as a result of something smashing into the Red Planet.

Researchers at Curtin University in Australia, in collaboration with the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Australia, narrowed Black Beauty's ejection point to one possible spot on Mars: a crater.

Approximately 1.5 billion years ago, an asteroid struck Mars and created Black Beauty's crater as the third. Khujirt crater formed from that impact, and the Dampier crater was formed 12 kilometers from Khujirt. 

The meteoroid that eventually became Black Beauty was ejected between five and ten million years ago by Dampier. In honor of an Australian mining town named Karratha, lead author Dr. Anthony Lagain named the crater Karratha. 

As part of my research into the oldest rocks on Earth, I named it Karratha because Karratha is very close to the Pilbara region.

Due to its ancient origin, Black Beauty is a potential source of planetary formation insights.

Future missions to Mars and, by extension, all terrestrial planets could land in the Sirenum province of Terra Cimmeria to unravel the first billions of years of Mars' history. 

The same technology Pawsey used for matching other asteroids to impact sites will be used by the Mars team regardless of whether a future Mars mission focuses on Karratha.