Nasa InSight Lander “heard” and detected the vibrations of four space rocks as they collided with Mars in the past two years.
It’s the first time a mission has captured seismic and acoustic waves from an impact on Mars, and InSight’s first impact detection since landing on the red planet in 2018.
Fortunately, InSight was not in the way of these meteoroids, the name for space rocks before they hit the ground. The impacts ranged from 85 to 290 kilometers away from the stationary probe’s position on Mars’ Elysium Planitia, a flat plain north of its equator.
A meteoroid hit the Martian atmosphere on September 5, 2021 and exploded into at least three fragments, each leaving behind a crater on the red planet’s surface.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter then flew over the site to confirm where the meteoroid landed, locating three dark areas. The orbiter’s color imager, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, took detailed close-ups of the craters.
Researchers shared their findings about the new craters in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, these craters looked beautiful,” study co-author Ingrid Daubar, assistant professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said in a statement.
InSight data also revealed three other similar impacts, one on May 27, 2020 and two additional ones in 2021 on February 18 and August 31.
The agency released a recording of a Martian meteoroid impact on Monday. During the clip, hear a very sci-fi sounding “bloop” (undersea sound) three times as space rock enters the atmosphere, explodes into pieces and hits the surface.
Listen:
Scientists have really questioned why more impacts were not detected on Mars because the planet is located close to our Solar System’s main asteroid belt, where many space rocks emerge to hit the Martian surface.
The Martian atmosphere is only 1% the thickness of Earth’s atmosphere, which means more meteoroids pass through it without disintegrating.
During its time on Mars, InSight used its seismometer to detect more than 1,300 marsquakes (Mars earthquakes), which occur when the Martian subsurface cracks due to pressure and heat.
The sensitive instrument can detect seismic waves occurring thousands of kilometers away from InSight’s location — but the September 2021 event is the first time scientists have used the waves to confirm an impact.
“Impacts are the clocks of the Solar System,” lead author Raphael Garcia, an academic researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France, said in a statement. “We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces.”
Studying the InSight data could provide researchers with a way to analyze the trajectory and size of the shock wave produced when the meteoroid enters the atmosphere, as well as when it hits the ground.
“We are learning more about the impact process itself,” Garcia said. “We can match different crater sizes with specific seismic and acoustic waves now.”
InSight’s mission is coming to an end as dust builds up on its solar panels and reduces their power. Eventually, the spacecraft will shut down, but the team isn’t sure when that will happen.
Latest readings suggested it could be shut down between October and January 2023.
Until then, the spacecraft still has a chance to add to its research portfolio and impressive collection of discoveries on Mars.
Source: CNN Brasil
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