NASA’s InSight spacecraft has recorded a magnitude 4 earthquake on Mars. It happened on December 24, 2021, but the cause of the earthquake has only just been discovered: the collision of a meteor, which scientists believe is one of the largest ever seen on the red planet.
NASA researchers discovered the cause of the earthquake when they analyzed images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images showed a new crater, approximately 150 meters in diameter and 21 meters deep, in a region called Amazonis Planitia. The impact of the phenomenon on the Martian soil caused part of the ejected material, specifically ice blocks, to fly up to 37 kilometers away.
With an estimated size of between five and 12 meters, the meteor was “small enough” to disappear in Earth’s atmosphere, but not in Mars’ atmosphere, which is only 1% denser than Earth.
The sound of the earthquake and the impact of the meteorite was recorded by NASA and can be heard here.
Experts believe this is one of the largest craters ever discovered anywhere in the solar system, from the time space missions to the red planet began.
“A new impact of this size is unprecedented,” he says. in statement Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, who leads InSight’s Impact Science Working Group. “It’s an exciting time in geological history, and we have to witness it.”
The earthquake that resulted from the meteorite impact was the first to be observed with surface waves, that is, a type of seismic wave that “ripples along the top of a planet’s crust.”
In late 2021, InSight scientists reported that a “great marsquake” (an earthquake on Mars) had occurred on December 24, 2021. The crater was first discovered on February 11, 2022 by experts working in Malin. cameras aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
One of the cameras, the Context Camera, provides medium-resolution black-and-white images, and the other, the Mars Color Imager, produces daily maps of the entire planet, allowing scientists to “track climate change on a large scale.” “. explains to NASA.
The impact zone of the meteor was observed through images captured by the Mars Color Imager camera, less than 24 hours after the phenomenon. The images and information about the seismic epicenter allowed us to understand that the earthquake occurred on December 24.
“The image of the impact was unlike anything I had seen before, with the huge crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust,” said Liliya Posiolova, a researcher who leads the Orbital Science and Operations Group. at Malin Space. science systems. “I couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like to witness the impact, the atmospheric explosion and the ejected debris from miles away.”
The capacity of the InSight spacecraft has been decreasing in recent months due to the dust that is deposited on its solar panels and, therefore, it should be turned off in the next six weeks, thus ending NASA’s mission that studies the crust , the mantle and the core of Mars. .
Since landing on the Red Planet in November 2018, InSight has detected 1,138 marsquakes, including several caused by smaller meteors.
Source: TSF
