Mars during its existence has survived three collisions with the planets

According to the theory of planet formation, during the creation of these objects from a protoplanetary gas disk

there is a constant collision of planets withsmall celestial bodies with a diameter of several thousand kilometers. For example, the formation of the Earth probably ended after a collision with a protoplanet the size of Mars - then the chemical composition of the Earth changed greatly, and this also led to the appearance of the Moon.

Many Martian meteorites, which are in differenttime fell to Earth, they were quite different from each other in chemical composition. Scientists from SwRI tried using computer simulation to reproduce the composition of these meteorites that moved from the bowels of the newborn Mars. It was possible to simulate such a composition only when Mars collided with at least three large protoplanets at the dawn of the formation of the Red Planet, while the objects should have consisted of the primary matter of the solar system.

If Mars has collided with large bodies,which were the core and the mantle, then its lithosphere should consist of an extremely heterogeneous mixture of these materials. Compared to the theories that implied that it was bombarded with small and uniform objects, a similar scenario leads to radically different conclusions about how and when Mars was born.

Robin Canup, a planetary scientist at SwRI    

For example, the presence of platinum in some Martian meteorites can be explained just by a collision with other space objects, whose diameter was at least 1 thousand square meters. km

This study also refutesthe theory of the appearance of Mars, according to which the Red Planet was finally formed in the first years of the existence of the Solar System. Modeling shows that its formation lasted at least 15 million years.

Scientists note that this theory can be proved only in the future, when the rovers will be able to take Martian soil from those areas where protoplanets could have fallen.