On Christmas Eve, a meteorite crashed into Mars, causing a lot of damage.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the impact crater and scientists were able to figure out where the earthquake came from. The discovery was disclosed by NASA on Thursday.
"It was immediately clear that this is the biggest new crater we've ever seen, and it's the biggest one we've seen so far," he said. It's about two city blocks wide. Even though meteorites are hitting the planet all the time, this crater is 10 times larger than the typical new crater on Mars.
There were boulders of water ice around the new crater. It is the closest to the equator that NASA has found. Scientists used to only see water ice near the poles.
NASA wants to send astronauts to Mars someday.
NASA prefers to land astronauts close to the equator. The explorers will need to mine water and break it down into hydrogen and oxygen to provide rocket fuel for their journey home.
One of the more than 1,300 earthquakes detected was caused by a meteorite. The first ever detected on another planet was caused by the two meteorites. seismologists call "body waves", rather than surface waves, when it comes to the seismology of earthquakes.
Doyeon Kim, who analyzed the data from those earthquakes, told Insider that it was one of the goals to detect and identify surface waves.
Two studies published in the journal Science on Thursday may help solve a centuries-old mystery about the location of Mars.
Astronomers have wondered why the northern and southern hemispheres are different. The south is full of mountains while the north is flat lowlands.
There are two leading theories for this juxtaposition. There are two types of rock in the north and south. In the South, the planet's crust is thicker. There is a model for how other rocky planets around other stars may have formed if the answer is yes.
Scientists were able to see the nearby Martian crust thanks to the surface waves from the meteorites.
Kim said that it provided a single or a tiny piece of evidence to begin to uncover the mystery.
NASA said that the Insight lander will likely run out of energy in the next six weeks.
The Insight mission has been collecting dust on its solar panels for the last four years, according to Bruce Barnerdt. In order to get as much science data as we can, we've cut back on the operations of the spacecraft.
A dust storm could have been the last nail in the coffin, but it didn't. It reduced the amount of sunlight that got to the ground by filling the atmosphere with dust particles.
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