[ad_1]
A NASA lander on Mars has captured the vibrations and sounds of four meteoroids hitting Earth’s surface.
The InSight lander detected seismic and sound waves in a series of impacts in 2020 and 2021, scientists report.
A satellite orbiting the red planet confirmed the impact location, 180 miles from the lander.
Scientists are delighted with the findings – a first on another planet.
The first confirmed meteoroid exploded into at least three pieces, each leaving its own crater.
An 11-second audio clip of the strike included three “bangs,” which, as NASA put it, sounded like metal flapping loudly in the wind on Earth.
Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, co-author of the study in the journal Nature Geoscience, said: “After InSight waited three years for impact, these craters have It looks beautiful.”
Given Mars’ proximity to the asteroid belt and Earth’s thin atmosphere, the InSight team expects to find many meteor impacts, which tend to prevent rocks from entering space from burning.
According to NASA, the lander’s French-made seismometer may have missed the impact due to interfering noise from Martian winds or seasonal changes in the atmosphere, but now scientists know what to look for, which could lead to detections surge.
“The impact is the clock of the solar system,” French lead author Rafael Garcia said in a statement from the Institute for Advanced Study in Aeronautics and Astronautics in Toulouse.
“We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces.”
Launched in 2018, InSight has detected more than 1,300 earthquakes. The largest quake measured earlier this year was a magnitude 5.
Earthquakes produced by meteoroid impacts do not exceed magnitude 2.
[ad_2]
Source link