Over the last two years, the NASA InSight Lander has "heard" and "seen" the vibrations of four space pebbles as they crashed onto Mars.
It is the first time a spacecraft has detected seismic and acoustic waves from a Mars impact. InSight has effects detected for the first time since it landed on the planet in 2018.
Thankfully, InSight was out of the way of these meteoroids, which are space rocks that are meteors before they reach Earth. The stationary lander was located in the flat plain of Elysium Planitia on Mars, slightly north of the planet's equator. The impacts ranged in the distance from the lander from 53 to 180 miles (85 to 290 kilometers).
CNN said a meteoroid struck the Martian atmosphere and burst into at least three pieces, each of which left a crater on the surface of the red planet on September 5, 2021.
The meteoroid's landing location was later confirmed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which saw three darker patches. The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, the orbiter's color imager, captured in-depth close-ups of the craters.
In a report released Monday in Nature Geoscience journal, researchers discussed their discoveries on the new craters.
NASA Insight Lander Hears Meteorite Hitting Mars
On Monday, scientists explained how InSight detected seismic and acoustic waves from the impact of four meteorites on its surface and computed the locations of the craters they left behind - the first such measurements outside of Earth.
The sites of the craters were verified by the researchers using data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in orbit.
"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, in a press release.
Since then, researchers have examined earlier InSight data and verified three further meteor collisions between 2020 and 2021. Later, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the meteor impact craters.
The researchers assume that there may be further meteor hits hidden in the seismometer data from the previous four years, lost in the seismic noise of a gust of wind because the impacts were so faint that scientists first missed them.
InSight Lander About to End Life
Since landing on Mars in 2018, InSight has just now discovered these first meteor hits. Over 1,300 earthquakes on Mars were discovered by the lander's sophisticated seismometer, demonstrating that the planet has a molten core and a thin, shattered crust similar to the moon's. Additionally, InSight has recorded dust devil seismic rumbles and obtained meteorological information.
But time is running short for the robot. Its landing location proved to be unexpectedly wind-free on the huge expanse of Elysium Planitia. Normally, NASA relies on wind gusts to clear the omnipresent Martian dust from the robot's solar panels. Such cleaning occurrences have been rare, according to InSight.
The lander's capacity to produce electricity has been gradually declining due to dust accumulation. Its battery could power an electric oven for one hour and forty minutes in 2018. According to mission manager Kathya Zamora Garcia, it could currently only operate such an oven for 10 minutes.
According to Business Insider, NASA experts thought the lander would run out of power and stop functioning altogether between October 2022 and January 2023.
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