Dr. Hörst Tweeted Image of Pieces of Moon and Mars in 2018

Dr. Sarah Horst, an Associate Prof. of Planetary Science at John Hopkins University, tweeted the picture circulating in April 2018.

She tweeted her experience being privileged to hold a piece of the moon and mars simultaneously as she reveals that the black one is the Martian one while the gray one is the moon.

Explaining how it's possible to have rocks from Mars even when we’ve never had a sample return mission, she says it's a martian meteorite, and it came to earth by itself during a process where the object was hit on Mars. She also tweeted that the chemical composition and isotopes of the piece match measurements of Mars from the spacecraft.

A reverse image search of the picture returned a result indicating that it has been reproduced 45 times within the last three years since it first surfaced on the internet.

The International Meteorite Collectors Association explains meteorites as objects composed of rock and sometimes metal derived from various solar system bodies, which lands on other solar system bodies (most likely Earth) and could also be the Moon and Mars other worlds) after traveling through space.

The association says the fall of most meteorites is usually not seen but is generally found long afterward and must be subjected to various forensic tests to ascertain their history. A recent example is a new type found in the Moroccan desert in 2011.

NASA announced in 1996 that data of microfossils (tiny remains of bacteria, protists, fungi, animals, and plants that suggest evidence of some form of life) might be present in one of these Mars meteorites.

National Geographic also asserts that scientists have identified more than 52,000 meteorites (which are space rocks that have crashed into the earth), and of these, no fewer than 100 have been to Mars.

These rocks were originated from Mars after NASA’s Viking spacecraft successfully landed on Earth in the 1970s. From its probing of measured chemicals in the Martian atmosphere and surface, they realized that many of the meteorites found on Earth contained the same precise concentrations of rock, minerals, and trapped gases as those on Mars and, as such, could only have come from there.