NASA’s InSight Lander Detects Stunning Meteoroid Impact on Mars

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NASA’s InSight lander has captured a stunning meteoroid impact on Mars that occurred last year

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

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A NASA satellite orbiting the red planet confirmed the impact locations, as far as 180 miles from the lander. 

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A NASA satellite orbiting the red planet confirmed the impact locations, as far as 180 miles from the lander. 

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“After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful,” study coauthor Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University, said in a statement.

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 The meteoroid is estimated to have spanned 16 to 39 feet 5 to 12 mts small enough that it would have burned up in earth’s atmosphere 

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 But not in mars’ thin atmosphere which is just 1 as dense as our planet’s

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The impact in a region called amazonis planitia blasted a crater roughly 490 feet 150 mts across and 70 feet 21 mts deep

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The event and its effects are detailed in two papers published in the journal science

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Now that scientists know what to look for, NASA says, a surge of detections may follow. 

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The InSight mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge 

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Launched in 2018, the lander has already detected more than 1,300 marsquakes. The largest measured a magnitude 5 earlier this year. 

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By comparison, the marsquakes generated by the meteoroid impacts registered no more than a magnitude 2 

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