To solve the mystery of the largest meteor crash on Mars, a spaceship flying over the planet and a probe with its ears attached to the surface have teamed up. Together, the InSight lander and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered the vast new crater on the planet’s surface.
The inquiry got underway when a magnitude 4 marsquake was reported on Christmas eve of last year by the InSight lander, which is on Mars to learn more about the churnings occurring below the surface. Analysis showed that a meteoroid strike considered to be one of the greatest seen on Mars since NASA started exploring the universe was the cause of the abrupt surge in the seismic data.
Last year’s high-speed barrages ripped out craters about 500 feet in diameter and sent seismic waves rippling thousands of kilometres across Mars, the first ever detected near the surface of another planet. The results were released in the Science journal. A meteor that was between 16 and 39 feet tall created the crater.
The meteor was sufficiently small to burn up in the atmosphere of Earth, but not in Mars’ thin atmosphere, which is only 1% as dense as that of our planet. Images of the crater, which is around 70 feet deep and where the collision occurred in the area known as Amazonis Planitia, show debris being thrown from the crash.
A separate study last month linked a recent series of smaller Martian meteoroid impacts with smaller craters closer to InSight, using data from the same lander and orbiter.
Post Your Comments