Carl Agee
The New Mexico scientist who led the 2013 study of Black Beauty, a Martian breccia full of water-bearing minerals and ancient crust.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Planetary scientist
Carl B. Agee is a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, where he has directed the Institute of Meteoritics founded by Lincoln LaPaz in 1944. His research uses high-pressure experiments to understand the interiors of planets.
In 2011 a dark, glossy stone found in the Sahara was offered to collectors. The American collector Jay Piatek bought it and passed samples to Agee's team. They found that it was unlike any Martian meteorite known. Instead of a single volcanic rock, it was a breccia, a cemented mixture of many different fragments, including pieces of soil and broken crust.
In January 2013 Agee and his colleagues described the stone, officially named Northwest Africa 7034 and nicknamed Black Beauty. It contained about ten times more water locked in its minerals than other Martian meteorites, and its chemistry matched the rocks studied by NASA's rovers on the Martian surface. Later work found zircon grains in it about 4.4 billion years old, among the oldest pieces of Mars known.
Black Beauty has given scientists a sample of the ancient Martian surface, when the planet was wetter and might have been habitable. Agee's team has also studied lunar meteorites and the Institute's large collection.
On the timeline
- January 2013Black Beauty is described