The Conversation contributed the article to Space.com's expert voices.
The School of Earth and Planetary Sciences is a part of the University.
In its quest to probe the internal structure of the red planet, NASA has recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes in the last year. The solar panels of the car-sized robotic lander have become caked with Martian dust, and NASA scientists expect it will power down by the end of the year.
The internal rumblings of our planetary neighbor aren't the only things seismometers detect: they also pick up the thumps of space rocks crashing into the Martian soil
In the new research, we used data from InSight to detect and locate four high-speed meteoroid collisions, and then tracked down the resulting craters in satellite images.
As power dwindles, NASA's Mars InSight landers snaps dusty selfies.
The solar system is home to a lot of small rocks called meteoroids. If a meteorite encounters a planet with an atmosphere, it may burn up before it reaches the ground.
On Earth, we know that incoming meteoroids are shooting stars in the night sky. A spectacular airburst can be created when a meteorite explodes when it reaches the thicker atmosphere.
meteorites come from a place. There were hundreds of fireballs in the sky.
Sometimes a space rock can survive through the air and fall to the ground as a meteorite.
A hole in the ground called an impact crater is created by a few meteorites. These events are very rare on the planet.
A recent survey of bright meteors above Australia was one of the many times scientists have detected the sound from the airbursts.
Only once has a high-speed space rock crashed into the ground has it been seen. The impact crater was formed near the village of Carancas.
Many impacts were detected on the moon by the network of sensors set up during the U.S. Apollo missions of the 1960's and 70's. There was no recording of the impact of a new crater.
A study suggests that the moon is geologically active.
Crash landings of the booster rockets of the ascent modules that lifted Apollo astronauts off the moon were the closest thing to such an observation.
The human-made impacts on the moon were recorded in two different ways. Simulations of how impacts produce seismic waves were recently tested using these data.
Waves are created in the atmosphere and on the ground by incoming meteorites. The atmosphere of Mars has a different composition than that of the Earth. The events on Mars are not the same as before.
The fate of the meteorite and any resulting crater is different from what we have come to expect on our home planet.
Single craters are the norm on Earth and the moon. Half the time on Mars, a high-speed space rock will burst in the atmosphere and cause a cluster of craters.
A cluster of small impacts can be formed by the separation of these individual fragments.
Four meteorite impact events have recently been observed by the InSight mission. We were able to estimate the location of the impacts by comparing the arrival times and other properties of the waves.
The locations were confirmed with satellite imagery.
Knowing the size and location of the impact craters helps us calculate the size and speed of the incoming space rock.
We can use the waves from the impact to learn about the interior of Mars once we know what happened. We can learn more about how the planets formed and how the solar system evolved when we compare the observations from Earth and the moon.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The article is open in a new tab.
Become a part of the discussion and follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates on social media. The author's views do not represent those of the publisher.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
