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  NASA’s InSight Lander has “heard” and detected the vibrations of four space rocks as they fell on Mars over the past two years.   

  It is the first time a mission has captured both seismic and acoustic waves from an impact on Mars, and the first impact detection by InSight since landing on the red planet in 2018.   

  Fortunately, InSight was not in the path of these meteoroids, the name given to space rocks before they hit the ground.  The impacts ranged from 53 to 180 miles (85 to 290 kilometers) away from the stationary lander’s location on Mars’ Elysium Planitia, a flat plain just north of its equator.   

  A meteorite hit the Martian atmosphere on September 5, 2021 and then exploded into at least three fragments, each leaving behind a crater on the red planet’s surface.   

  The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter then flew over the site to confirm where the meteorite landed, spotting three dark areas.  The orbiter’s color imager, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, took detailed close-up shots of the craters.   

  Researchers shared their findings about the new craters in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.   

  “After three years of waiting for InSight to detect an impact, these craters looked beautiful,” said study co-author Ingrid Daubar, assistant professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.   

  Data from InSight also revealed three other similar impacts, one on May 27, 2020, and two more in 2021 on February 18 and August 31.   

  The agency released a recording of a meteor impact on Mars on Monday.  During the clip, hear a very sci-fi “bloop” three times as the space rock enters the atmosphere, explodes into pieces and hits the surface.   

  Scientists have wondered why more impacts haven’t been detected on Mars because the planet is next to our solar system’s main asteroid belt, where many space rocks emerge to hit the Martian surface.  Mars’ atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth’s, meaning more meteorites pass through it without breaking up.   

  During its stay on Mars, InSight used its seismometer to detect more than 1,300 earthquakes, which occur when the Martian subsurface cracks due to pressure and heat.  The sensitive instrument can detect seismic waves occurring thousands of miles away from InSight’s location – but the September 2021 event is the first time scientists have used the waves to confirm an impact.   

  It is possible that Martian wind noise or seasonal changes occurring in the atmosphere masked the additional effects.  Now that researchers understand what the seismic signature of an impact looks like, they expect to find more when they study InSight data from the past four years.   

  Seismic waves help researchers unlock additional information about the Martian interior because they change as they move through different material.   

  Meteor impacts create earthquakes of magnitude 2.0 or less.  So far, the largest earthquake detected by InSight was a magnitude 5 in May.   

  Impact craters help scientists understand the age of a planet’s surface.  Researchers can also determine how many of the craters formed early in the solar system’s turbulent history.   

  “The impacts are the clocks of the solar system,” lead author Raphael Garcia, an academic researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France, said in a statement.  “We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces.”   

  Studying the InSight data may offer researchers a way to analyze the trajectory and size of the shock wave produced when the meteoroid enters the atmosphere, as well as once it hits the ground.   

  “We’re learning more about the impact process itself,” Garcia said.  “We can match different crater sizes to specific seismic and acoustic waves now.”   

  InSight’s mission is nearing its end as dust accumulates on its solar panels and saps its power.  Eventually, the spacecraft will shut down, but the team isn’t sure when that will happen.   

  The latest readings suggest it could close between next October and January 2023.   

  Until then, the spacecraft still has a chance to add to its research portfolio and amazing collection of discoveries on Mars.