The discovery of a new meteorite crater on Mars has revealed a potential new resource that could be crucial to NASA’s plans for future human exploration of the Red Planet.
Last Christmas Eve, NASA received a special gift from outer space. A small asteroid slammed into the surface of Mars on December 24, 2021. It impacted a large, flat region of the planet called Amazonis Planitia, located just west of the huge Martian volcano, Olympus Mons.
No spacecraft or surface mission witnessed the actual impact at the time it occurred. However, NASA’s InSight lander, a few thousand miles away, picked up seismic waves radiating from the impact site. The lander’s sensitive SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) instrument recorded the tremor as one of the largest earthquakes it has detected so far.
At the time, the science team did not know it was a meteorite impact.
However, the next time NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the origin of the earthquake, the images it sent back managed to capture the new crater that the space rock blasted to the surface.
These two images from the MRO’s pop-up camera show before and after views of the location of the meteorite impact on December 24, 2021, in a region of Mars called Amazonis Planitia. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
The crater has been measured at around 150 meters wide and over 20 meters deep! This apparently makes it the largest cool crater ever photographed by MRO in the 16 years it has orbited Mars!
The meteoroid that formed the crater is estimated to be between 5 and 12 meters in diameter. Such a space rock would have shattered in Earth’s atmosphere, possibly scattering meteorites to the surface. However, the very thin atmosphere of Mars posed almost no obstacle to it. Thus, he hit the ground with almost all his force.
Even more remarkable than the crater itself is what MRO images have captured around it.
This close-up view of the crater that formed on December 24, 2021 was taken by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE Camera) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Boulder-sized blocks of water ice can be seen around the rim of the impact crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
In the image above, brilliant white and blue regions stand out against the dusty surface of Amazonis Planitia. These are large patches and blocks the size of a boulder frozen waterhollowed out below the surface by the force of the impact.
“The impact image was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, exposed ice, and dramatic blast zone preserved in Martian dust,” said Liliya Posiolova, author principal of the study that located the crater. in a NASA press release. Posiolova leads the orbital science and operations group at Malin Space Science Systems. “I couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like to witness the impact, the atmospheric explosion and the ejected debris miles away.”
This is apparently the first time we have seen such a water ice deposit so close to the equator of Mars.
“Underground ice will be a vital resource for astronauts, who could use it for a variety of needs, including drinking water, agriculture and rocket propellant,” NASA said. “Buried ice has never been spotted this close to the Martian equator, which, as the hottest part of Mars, is an attractive location for astronauts.”
Author’s note: In the video that opens this story, NASA details another meteorite impact on Mars, detected in early September 2021. According to a space agency report last month, this was the first seismic event recorded by InSight confirmed to be from a meteoroid impact. The data reviewed for this discovery also led to the discovery of three other impacts from the InSight recordings, May 27, 2020, February 18, 2021 and August 31, 2021.
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