It wasn’t the average earthquake the Insight Mars lander heard roaring through the Red Planet’s soil last Christmas Eve.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter apparently found the source of the rumble a few months later from its vantage point in space: a spectacular meteor strike more than 2,000 miles near Mars’ equator, estimated to be the one of the largest impacts observed on the neighboring planet.
But what thrills scientists perhaps as much or more than the recorded seismic activity was what the meteor discovered when it slammed into Mars – huge boulder-sized chunks of ice thrown out from the crater. Until now, no underground ice had been found in this region, the hottest part of the planet.
“It’s really an exciting result,” Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary sciences, said at a press conference Thursday. “We know, of course, that there is water ice near the poles on Mars. But in planning for future human exploration of Mars, we would like to land astronauts as close to the equator as possible. , and having access to ice at those poles at lower latitudes, that ice can be converted into water, oxygen, or hydrogen could be really helpful.
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NASA just showed us why its Mars lander will soon run out of power
The finding, recently published in two related studies in the journal Science, is something of a grand finale for NASA’s Insight lander, which is rapidly losing power. Scientists estimated they had about four to eight weeks left before losing contact with the lander. At that point, the mission will end.
Over the past four years, Insight has studied more than 1,000 Marchquakes and collected daily weather reports. It detected the planet’s large liquid core and helped map the internal geology of Mars.
Program officials have been preparing the public for this outcome for some time. As the spacecraft sat on the surface of Mars, dust collected on its solar panels. The red desert planet’s layers of sand have blocked the rays it needs to convert into energy. The team reduced Insight’s operations to extract as much science as possible before the hardware was destroyed.
As the Insight lander touched down on the surface of Mars, dust collected on its solar panels
Credit: NASA
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Then the team received a bit more bad news last month. A severe dust storm swept across much of Mar’s southern hemisphere. Insight dropped from around 400 watt-hours per Martian day to less than 300.
“Unfortunately, since it’s such a big dust storm, it actually put a lot of dust in the atmosphere, and it dramatically reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the solar panels,” Bruce said. Banerdt, Insight Principal Investigator. at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
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But NASA thinks scientists will continue to learn a lot about past climatic conditions on Mars and when and how ice was buried there from the cool crater, which spans 500 feet wide and a just under 70 feet deep.
They’re convinced the ice came from Mars and not the meteor, said Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who leads InSight’s impact science working group.
“An impact of this size would actually destroy the meteorite that came to hit the surface,” she said. “We wouldn’t expect much, if any, from the original impactor to survive this high-energy explosion.”
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