Now, a slew of recent studies based on evidence from the space rock are helping scientists understand more about the Red Planet's history of habitability.
Two especially famous specimens include the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, which contains tantalizing 4 billion-year-old organic molecules; and NWA 7034, a meteorite with 4.4 billion-year components and specks of ancient water.
Teghaza 001, however, may help fill that knowledge gap.
In a preprint uploaded April 14, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers measured the rate of multiple types of radioactive decay in different minerals, including tiny crystals called zircons, which are embedded within Teghaza 001, and found that the multiple measures agreed on an age at least 4.1 billion years ago. This may make the space rock the single oldest-known piece of Mars.
But Mars has no tectonic plates, and its surface seems to be made of basalt, the dark, heavy volcanic rock that forms from quick-cooling lava — and also the stuff that makes the Hawaiian islands.
Are plate tectonics really necessary?
(Image credit: Mackay-Champion et al., Nature Astronomy, 2026)The researchers used seismic data from NASA's InSight lander to model Mars' interior, and found evidence that it once housed huge, interconnected magma networks that may have stretched thousands of miles beneath its northern hemisphere.
"If Mars could develop this kind of complex crust without plate tectonics, then maybe the conditions needed for habitability can emerge on more planets than we realised, including those previously dismissed based on size or their apparent lack of tectonic activity," Wade added.
The solar system gives, and the solar system takes
While this may sound encouraging for the emergence of Martian life, Teghaza 001 also offered evidence that Mars began losing its water early in its history.
An illustration showing what a potential primitive ocean on Mars might look like. (Image credit: NASA/GSFC)To explore when Mars' water began seeping into space, the researchers examined the meteorites’ ratios of hydrogen to deuterium, a heavier version of hydrogen that contains a neutron in addition to the one proton and one electron that make up basic hydrogen atoms.
Related storiesBecause hydrogen is lighter, it more readily escapes into space, leaving behind a greater abundance of deuterium. The results "indicate that Mars lost a substantial proportion of its juvenile atmosphere to space within a few hundred million years after the magma ocean solidified," the researchers wrote in the study.
While Teghaza opens a rare window onto Mars’ earliest epochs, scientists urge that more samples are needed to truly understand Martian history. James Day, a professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who was not involved in this research, noted that this finding is drawn from a small, rare piece of evidence. "I would caution that all of these arguments would have been based on a single small stone," he told Live Science in an email.
What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!
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