September 21, 2022
By Aahil
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA spacecraft on Mars has captured the rumblings as well as the sounds from four meteoroids hitting the surface of the planet.
Scientists have announced Mars InSight detected seismic and Acoustic waves from a sequence of collisions in the years 2020-2021.
A satellite orbiting the red planet has confirmed the location of the impact up to 200 miles (290 kilometers) from the lander.
The first confirmed meteoroid burst into 3 pieces with each of which left their own crater.
An audio snippet of 11 seconds of this strike contains three "bloops," as NASA calls them, each sounds like metal flapping in the breeze 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 that was published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, said in an announcement.
The InSight team was expecting to observe a variety of meteoroids, due to Mars being close to the belt of the asteroid, as well as Mars's thin atmosphere which can prevent rock fragments from burning.
However, the seismometer built by France could have missed collisions due to interference caused by the Martian winds or seasonal fluctuations in the atmospheric pressure.
Scientists now know what to look for according to NASA and is likely to lead to the discovery of more detectors.