NASA's Mars lander records four incoming space rocks striking it

The sounds and vibrations of four meteoroids striking the surface of Mars were recorded by a NASA lander. Researchers revealed on Monday that the Mars InSight instrument picked up seismic and acoustic waves from several impacts that occurred in 2020 and 2021. The impact locations, which were up to 180 miles (290 kilometres) from the lander, were confirmed by a satellite in orbit around the red planet. 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 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. Read all the Latest News _, _ Trending News _, _ Cricket News _, _ Bollywood News _, _ India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook _, _ Twitter and Instagram _._