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Nakhla meteoroid
Details
The Nakhla meteoroid was the Martian body whose fragments fell in Egypt in 1911 as the Nakhla meteorite. Studies of nakhlites show that liquid water later altered this rock on Mars, preserving one of the clearest meteoritic records of Martian aqueous history.
The Nakhla meteoroid matters because it is not just debris from space. It is material from Mars that made its way to Earth and became available for direct laboratory study. That alone makes it unusually powerful as an object of knowledge. Instead of inferring everything remotely from orbiters and rovers, scientists can examine the mineralogical record of a Martian rock in hand.
What makes Nakhla especially important is the evidence that this rock was altered by liquid water on Mars after it originally formed. That turns it into more than a sample of igneous planetary crust. It becomes a record of interaction between rock and water on another world. Few meteoritic materials offer such a direct link between a hand specimen on Earth and environmental conditions on a specific planet.
That is why the Nakhla meteoroid matters on this scale. It shows that some objects crossing the atmosphere are not generic stones at all, but planetary messengers with a named origin. Nakhla compresses the distance between planets: a fragment of Mars entered Earth's sky, landed, and now serves as a laboratory witness to Mars's geological past.
22.3cm
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
Key facts
- Category
- Meteoritic material
- Object class
- Martian meteoroid
- Scale fact
- ~60 cmpre-entry diameter
- Composition
- Basaltic Martian rock
Scale context
Where Nakhla meteoroid sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, Nakhla meteoroid sits between Ordinary chondrite and Hoba meteoroid. The band below uses nearby Meteoritic material objects for context.
Shared physical scale
35.8m
Together, these objects make the size change around Nakhla meteoroid easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.