A team of scientists led by Michael Zolensky, a mineralogist at NASA's Johnson Space Center, thinks it has found several minute samples of water sealed inside the salt crystals in the Monahans meteorite. The minute droplets of salty brine, which would have traveled through the solar system for millions of years as tiny ice crystals, could reveal the details of early solar-system chemistry. They may also tell scientists how and where water formed, whether it was in the early days of the solar system, or farther away and back in time somewhere in interstellar space.

The discovery is explained in an article in this week's edition of the journal Science.

Two pieces of the Monahans meteorite, each weighing more than 2.5 pounds (1200 and 1300 grams), smashed to the ground in Monahans, Texas in March 1998. The fall received nationwide attention because seven boys, who were playing basketball only a few dozen feet from where the meteorite slammed into the ground, witnessed it.

By noon the next day, Everett Gibson, a meteorite specialist at Johnson and co-author of the Science paper, arrived in Monahans to examine the meteorite. He persuaded the city to loan NASA the meteorite for research. It was in the laboratory within 48 hours of landing on Earth.

That fact, the researchers say, is key to the discovery of the ancient treasure they report. Both the salts and the water they noticed would have been contaminated and rendered worthless had the rock been touched by any common variety of water from Earth. Even moisture in the air quickly begins to react with meteorites to rub out some of their secrets.

When the researchers cracked open a small chunk of Monahans, they found small crystals of sodium chloride. That's common table salt on Earth -- but unlike the worldly version of the mineral, the crystals were bright purple. The coloration is a feature caused by the intense radiation environment of space, which has been replicated on earth only in nuclear reactors. Within the salt crystals the researchers noticed minute bubbles of liquid, which upon analysis, they determined to be water.

For years, meteorite researchers have seen indirect evidence that chemical reactions involving water have ocurred on asteroids, Zolensky said, but they could only guess what the water was like.

"Was it brine? What PH was it? We always had to guess, but now we have actual samples of the water, which we can quickly characterize. That will tell us what the state of water was in the early solar system. But beyond that, we should be able to tell if the water is interstellar water."

One of the great mysteries of water, Zolensky said, its origin is not known. Whether it was created in interstellar space and traveled into the solar system as ice in comets, or whether it was made by some process during planetary formation is a great mystery, he said. A mystery that the tiny droplets of meteoritic water may help answer.