Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Christmas came a little early for NASA's InSight mission last December when the lander detected a massive quake on Mars.
Now, scientists know what caused the red planet to rumble. A meteoroid slammed into Mars 2,174 miles (3,500 kilometers) away from the lander and created a fresh impact crater on the Martian surface.
The ground literally moved beneath InSight on December 24, 2021, when the lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake. Before and after photos captured from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since 2006, spotted a new crater this past February.
When scientists connected the dots from both missions, they realized it was one of the largest meteoroid strikes on Mars since NASA began studying the red planet. Images from the orbiter's two cameras showed the blast zone of the crater, which allowed scientists to compare it with the epicenter of the quake detected by InSight.
The journal Science published two new studies describing theimpact and its effects on Thursday.
The space rock also revealed boulder-size ice chunks when it slammed into Mars. They were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet.
[...] InSight lander's final selfie on Mars shows why its mission is ending
The mission scientists estimate InSight will likely shut down in the next six weeks, ending a promising mission to unlock the interior of Mars.
"For the last four years we've gone well beyond the intended lifetime of the mission, which was two years," Banerdt said. " And even now as we're winding down, we're still getting these amazing new results."
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 29 2022, @04:33PM (1 child)
To detect a strike as magnitude 4 from 3.5k km (3.5 megameters?) away, I'd guess Mars must be plenty hard and maybe brittle, nothing in the crust or perhaps mantle that is liquid or would liquefy.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday October 29 2022, @07:27PM
Yep, 3.5Mm away. It's not a unit that I've seen get a lot of use. Probably because it's such an awkward size range. Without decimals you only get a single digit of detail at precision planetary scales (Diameter of Earth = 12Mm), and mostly skip right past Mm at astronomical scales (diameter of Moon's orbit = 770Mm).
And in orbit you mostly care about not hitting other things in orbit, for which comfortable buffer zones are mostly measured in km.