These events send sound waves through the atmosphere. Every meteoroid creates a shock wave as it hits the atmosphere and an explosion as it hits the ground. InSight’s data, in combination with orbital images, can be used to rebuild a meteoroid’s trajectory and the size of its shock wave.
By calibrating their statistical models based on how often they see impacts occurring now, scientists can then estimate how many more impacts happened earlier in the solar system’s history. Scientists can approximate the age of a planet’s surface by counting its impact craters: The more they see, the older the surface. “We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces.” “Impacts are the clocks of the solar system,” said the paper’s lead author, Raphael Garcia of Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France. But now that the distinctive seismic signature of an impact on Mars has been discovered, scientists expect to find more hiding within InSight’s nearly four years of data.īut the impacts will be critical to refining Mars’ timeline. InSight’s team suspects that other impacts may have been obscured by noise from wind or by seasonal changes in the atmosphere. 5, 2021, event marks the first time an impact was confirmed as the cause of such waves. Provided by France’s space agency, the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, the instrument is so sensitive that it can detect seismic waves from thousands of miles away. InSight’s seismometer has detected over 1,300 marsquakes. Because Mars’ atmosphere is just 1% as thick as Earth’s, more meteoroids pass through it without disintegrating. The Red Planet is next to the solar system’s main asteroid belt, which provides an ample supply of space rocks to scar the planet’s surface. Researchers have puzzled over why they haven’t detected more meteoroid impacts on Mars. “After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful,” said Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, a co-author of the paper and a specialist in Mars impacts.Īfter combing through earlier data, scientists confirmed three other impacts had occurred on Feb. After locating these spots, the orbiter’s team used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, to get a color close-up of the craters (the meteoroid could have left additional craters in the surface, but they would be too small to see in HiRISE’s images). The orbiter used its black-and-white Context Camera to reveal three darkened spots on the surface. Then, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the estimated impact site to confirm the location.
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