NASA Mars lander captures strikes by 4 incoming space rocks

A NASA lander on Mars has captured the vibrations and sounds of four meteoroids striking the planet’s surface.

Scientists reported Monday that Mars InSigh t detected seismic and acoustic waves from a series of impacts in 2020 and 2021. A satellite orbiting the red planet confirmed the impact locations, as far as 180 miles (290 kilometers) from the lander.

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Scientists are delighted by the detections — a first for another planet.

The first confirmed meteoroid exploded into at least three pieces, each leaving its own crater. An 11-second audio snippet of this strike includes three “bloops,” as NASA calls them, one of sounding like metal flapping loudly in the wind here on Earth.

“After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful,” Brown University’s Ingrid Daubar, a co-author of the research paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, said in a statement.

The InSight team expected to pick up numerous meteoroid strikes, given Mars’ proximity to the asteroid belt and the planet’s thin atmosphere, which tends to keep entering space rocks from burning up. But the lander’s French-built seismometer may have missed impacts because of interfering noise from the Martian wind or seasonal changes in the atmosphere. Now scientists know what to look for, according to NASA, likely resulting in a surge of detections.

“Impacts are the clocks of the solar system,” French lead author Raphael Garcia said in a statement from the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space in Toulouse. “We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces.”

Launched in 2018, InSight has already detected more than 1,300 marsquakes. The largest measured a magnitude 5 earlier this year. By comparison, the marsquakes generated by the meteoroid impacts registered no more than a magnitude 2.

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NASA Mars lander captures what it sounds like when a meteorite hits Mars

Whether it was through a movie or reality, humans have always wondered what it would be like if a significant space rock hit Earth.

Believe it or not, space material is always hitting our planet; NASA says scientist estimate 48.5 tons of it do everyday. Even though material like meteors, also known as fireballs, have been known to cause a loud “boom” or light up the sky over areas, it’s rare to hear the material actually hit Earth’s surface.

But on our neighboring planet, NASA says they were able to “hear” what it sounds like when space rocks hit a planet.

NASA’s InSight lander, which has been studying Mars’ interior since landing on it in 2018, was able to detect seismic waves from four space rocks that hit the planet in 2020 and 2021, marking the first time these waves have ever been detected on Mars. Researchers had their findings published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.

The lander was luckily spared when a space rock hit Mars on Sept. 5, 2021; it was between 53-to-180 miles away from the impact zone, as the rock broke into three pieces before hitting the surface.

However, InSight has a seismometer to detect any “Marsquakes” on the planet. After recording the impact, NASA sent its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to confirm the location of the impact, and located the craters for all three space rock pieces.

“After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful,” Ingrid Daubar, co-author of the paper and planetary scientist at Brown University, said in a statement.

Later observations found the InSight lander detected impacts in May 2020, February 2021 and August 2021.