NASA’s InSight lander detects space rocks as they slam into Mars

Scientists are now gaining a fuller understanding of this Martian trait.

Washington (Agency/Web Desk) Mars, by virtue of its tenuous atmosphere and proximity to our solar system’s asteroid belt, is far more vulnerable than Earth to being struck by space rocks and one of the many differences between the two planetary neighbors.

Scientists are now gaining a fuller understanding of this Martian trait, with help from NASA’s robotic InSight lander. Researchers described how InSight detected seismic and acoustic waves from the impact of four meteorites and then calculated the location of the craters they left – the first such measurements anywhere other than Earth.

Furthermore “These seismic measurements give us a completely new tool for investigating Mars, or any other planet we can land a seismometer on,” said planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the InSight mission’s principal investigator.

The space rocks InSight tracked – one landing in 2020 and the other three in 2021 – were relatively modest in size, estimated to weigh up to about 440 pounds (200 kg), with diameters of up to about 20 inches (50 cm) and leaving craters of up to about 24 feet (7.2 meters) wide. They landed between 53 miles (85 km) and 180 miles (290 km) from InSight’s location. One exploded into at least three pieces that each gouged their own craters.

“We can connect a known source type, location and size to what the seismic signal looks like. We can apply this information to better understand InSight’s entire catalog of seismic events, and use the results on other planets and moons, too,” said Brown University planetary scientist Ingrid Daubar, a co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

According to the source, the researchers believe that now the seismic signature of such impacts has been discovered they expect to find more contained in InSight’s data, going back to 2018.

The three-legged InSight – its name is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – landed in 2018 in a vast and relatively flat plain just north of the Martian equator called Elysium Planitia.