Insight Lander and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter helped NASA researchers find a 150-meter-wide crater formed by the impact of meteorite .
pebbles-sized ice cubes scattered around the impact crater. Photo: NASA
NASA's Insight Mission landed on Mars in November 2018 to observe the interior of Mars and map soil layers and fault lines. On December 24, 2021, the lander made an important discovery when picking up the seismic wave in a large asteroid impact. Photos taken from the orbit make the discovery even more compelling, as through it, scientists discovered a huge new crater.
"This is the largest crater we have ever seen," Brown University planetary scientist Ingrid Doba said in a press conference on October 27. "We think that a crater of such a large will form on Mars every few decades. So it's exciting to be able to witness this event, and luckily it happened when the Insight Station records seismic data."
9 In September, scientists on the InSight mission announced that four asteroid impacts were detected in 2020 and early 2021, each of which created a new crater. But they are all slight impacts. No collision produced earthquakes of more than magnitude 2. InSight team members think they can’t see stronger signals from the collision, so the Insight site’s December 24 data was unexpected. Observations revealed a level 4 impact and formed a crater over 130 meters wide.
As the Insights team is investigating the origin of the collision, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has also discovered a huge new crater, according to Liliya Posiolova, head of the orbital science operations team for the MRO mission in California. Posiolova and colleagues first saw this new crater in data collected by MRO’s Context camera.
According to Daubar, the crater span is 150 meters, which is equivalent to two blocks, and 10 times the typical crater on Mars. Based on the size of the crater, scientists estimate that the asteroid hitting the red planet is about 5-12 meters wide. The meteorite penetrates deep into the surface of Mars, enough to shoot out large chunks of pebbles and water ice. Since the impact could completely destroy the meteorite, the team believes that the ice splash comes from below the Martian surface. The crater formed by the meteorite is about 3,500 kilometers away from the Insight Station.
researchers described the finding in two papers published in the journal Science on August 27. This is probably the last discovery InSight has released before the task is over. Due to the dust accumulated on solar panels , the landing station has very little energy. The station's seismometer currently only observes 8 hours of Mars in four days. The InSight team predicts that the task will be completed in the next few months.
