 NASA officials say some rare and distinct meteorites found on Earth were actually rocks ejected from Mars after a large impact event. One such rock from the red planet made its way to an Army laboratory recently for a special X-ray look inside. Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, the Army's corporate laboratory known as ARL, have powerful tools to look deep inside metal and rock. They can see into objects and provide insightful analysis. Recently, NASA asked them to look inside a Mars meteorite named Black Beauty, a sample about the size of a baseball and weighing about half a pound. What's unique about Black Beauty is that it's one of the oldest Martian meteorites that has been discovered on Earth and it has been proven to have some evidence of water. That's what makes it so special. Experts from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland proposed a collaborative project to look at Apollo 16 lunar samples. The moon project soon led to the Martian meteorite project. I think there's a lot of benefits that the collaboration between NASA and ARL can provide and in the bigger picture we're also, ARL is now also supporting the national space policy. That's helping to advance the mission of going back to the moon and Mars and so in that regard ARL is helping a much bigger picture of advancing science. Army scanning instruments provide high-resolution images at full three-dimensional volume non-destructively. Army researchers use this equipment to study the relationships between the processing of materials, the microstructure and ultimately relate that to mechanical performance. So with the X-ray CT scan we can non-destructively identify voids and defects such as cracks within the material prior to testing. For instance, 3D printed materials are scanned for defects and researchers use this information to create stronger materials for future soldiers. For NASA, the data is a goldmine previously invisible. Science is really intrinsically collaborative because even just the peer review process that allows us to publish our work requires our peers to understand what we're doing not just from a written page or computer screen. And so collaboration I think starts at birth in science and so working together with new measurement techniques that measure the previously unmeasured in things that we're barely understanding is the best way to go. The NASA team sees this collaboration as beneficial. You know space is a big place and there's a lot of work to be done and we were lucky thanks to partnerships between our engineers together with colleagues who they've met through conferences at the U.S. Army Research Lab. We were able to put together the pieces and develop a partnership to start looking at extraterrestrial materials from the moon and Mars in ways that have pushed the limits of resolution. Seton said the entire ARL team was impressed the first time they saw the Martian meteorites. We met in a conference room and they took it out and we were all able to put on gloves and hold it so that was really neat and it's just amazing that this came from another planet and we can hold it in our hand. Scientists from both organizations plan to jointly publish two journal articles later this year about the research into both lunar and Martian X-ray scans. We are definitely looking into opening up the dynamic of this relationship that's newly forming between NASA and ARL. What we all have in common is just curiosity and interest in what we're doing. We're all very passionate about what we do. I'm passionate about technology and new technology and anything that we can do to improve how we do things, how we look at things. The scientists like Dr. Garvin are really interested in what can we learn from this technology from a science perspective and I think those are the same curiosities that are felt at ARL. I never expected that this would happen. I have scanned a lot of interesting materials over the course of my years here at ARL but I have never scanned something so unique and valuable.