While Curiosity is busy capturing oddities, NASA’s InSight Mars lander recorded the sound of a meteoroid striking the Red Planet. More specifically, it detected seismic waves from four space rocks that crashed on the Martian surface in 2020 and 2021. These recordings represent the first impacts detected by the spacecraft’s seismometer since it touched down on the Red Planet in 2018.
To date, InSight’s seismometer detected over 1,300 marsquakes, and since the instrument is so sensitive. it can detect seismic waves from thousands of miles away. However, the event on Sept. 5, 2021 marked the first time an impact was confirmed as the cause of such waves. These four confirmed meteoroid impacts produced small quakes with a magnitude of no greather than 2.0.
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InSight’s team suspects that other impacts may have been obscured by noise from wind or by seasonal changes in the atmosphere. But now that the distinctive seismic signature of an impact on Mars has been discovered, scientists expect to find more hiding within InSight’s nearly four years of data,” said NASA.
