A colossal meteorite struck Mars. Then NASA made an even bigger discovery.

The Insight Mars landers heard a big marsquake on Christmas Eve.

A spectacular meteorite strike over 2,000 miles away near Mars' equator is estimated to be one of the largest impacts on the neighboring planet.

The huge, boulder-size chunks of ice blasted out of the crater are what scientists are most excited about. This region is the warmest part of the planet.

NASA's director of planetary science said during a news conference that the result was exciting. There is water ice on Mars. In planning for future human exploration of Mars, we would like to land the astronauts near the equator and have access to ice at the lower latitudes. It could be useful.

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The discovery, recently published in two related studies in the journal Science, is something of a grand finale for NASA's Insight landers. The scientists think they have about four to eight weeks left before they lose contact. The mission will end at that time.

Insight has been studying marsquakes for the past four years. The planet has a large liquid core.

The public has been prepared by program leaders for a while. Dust has built up on the solar panels of the spaceship. The red desert planet blocks out the rays that it needs to turn into power. Insight's operations have been reduced to squeeze out as much science as possible before the hardware dies.

While the Insight lander has sat on the surface of Mars, dust has accumulated on its solar panels Credit: NASA

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There was more bad news last month. There was a dust storm in Mar's southern hemisphere. Insight used to have around 400 watt-hours per day.

"Unfortunately, since this is such a large dust storm, it's put a lot of dust up into the atmosphere, and it has cut down the amount of sunlight reaching the solar panels by quite a bit," said Bruce Banerdt, Insight's principal investigator at NASA.

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NASA believes scientists will learn a lot about the past climate conditions on Mars and when and how ice was buried there from the fresh crater which spans 500 feet wide and just shy of 70 feet deep.

According to a planetary scientist at Brown University, they believe the ice came from Mars and not the meteorite.

She said that an impact of this size would cause the meteorite to be destroyed. We wouldn't expect much from the original impactor.