Could a controversial meteorite help scientists better understand how habitable Mars was in the ancient past? New studies of Allan Hills 84001 - a piece of cosmic debris named for the site in Antarctica where it was found, and which is best known for stirring up claims of Martian life in the 1990s - show that its origin story does at least include a lot of water.

While various space missions are orbiting Mars and roving its surface to search for ancient signs of water, scientists are also scouring the only pieces of Mars that they can get their hands on: meteorites. ALH84001 (as the meteorite is typically abbreviated) was found in 1984 and has a similar composition to other meteorites from Mars. With today's more sophisticated analytical tools, meteorites are regularly revisited for new hints of their history. This latest investigation of Allan Hills is just one example.

"Our study, and previous ones on the oldest Martian meteorites, are just showing the tip of the iceberg," said Josep Trigo-Rodriguez, a tenured scientist at Spain's Institute of Space Sciences, in an e-mail to Seeker. Trigo-Rodriguez co-authored a new paper on ALH84001 that was recently published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

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"Mars can surprise us and certainly we need to go there, and implement sample-return missions to sample and study in our labs the oldest Martian rocks," he added. "I'm particularly convinced that Mars could have developed the right conditions to create a biosphere, but the question to ask is if that environment lasted long enough to create simple living organisms."