In a new study set for publication on July 15 in the journal Icarus, an international team of researchers found that about one-third of the organic material on Mars was delivered there by asteroid and comet strikes. To determine this, the researchers created a computer model of the solar system that included hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets. Then they used Peregrine — a supercomputer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands — to run multiple simulations.

After running the simulations for a few weeks, the researchers were surprised to find that comets and asteroids are likely responsible for about one-third of the 192 tons of carbon that plummets to Mars each year. More specifically, they found that asteroids deliver about 50 tons of the organic material per year (26 percent), while comets account for around 13 tons (7 percent).