The recording, posted Sept. 19 on YouTube, combines “seismic and acoustic waves” detected when a space rock hit Mars on Sept. 5, 2021, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a news release.
Lasting only about 3 seconds, the sound begins with a whistle – the rock flying in the sky – and ends with “bloops”.
“It was the first time the sound of a meteor impacting another planet was recorded, and it might not be what you expected,” the lab says.
NASA reports that these three craters were formed on September 5, 2021, by a meteorite impact on Mars and were “the first detected by NASA’s InSight.” NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
“You hear three ‘bloops’ representing distinct moments of the impact: the meteoroid enters the Martian atmosphere, explodes into pieces, and hits the ground. The strange sound is caused by an atmospheric phenomenon that has also been observed in deserts on Earth, where lower-pitched sounds arrive before high-pitched sounds.”
The meteoroid – “the term for incoming space rocks before they hit the ground” – exploded into at least three pieces, leaving three distinct craters, scientists say.
NASA says the InSight lander picked up the seismic waves, and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the impact site and photographed “three dark spots on the surface.”
A paper published Sept. 19 in the journal Nature Geoscience says NASA has recorded four meteor impacts on Mars since August 2021, “between 53 and 180 miles (85 and 290 kilometers) from InSight’s location.”
All four produced markers (like earthquakes) in the 2.0 magnitude range, officials say.
“Researchers have been puzzled why they haven’t detected more meteor impacts on Mars,” says NASA.
“The Red Planet lies adjacent to the main asteroid belt of the Solar System, which provides an abundant supply of space rocks to pockmark the planet’s surface. Because Mars’ atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth’s, more meteorites pass through it without disintegrating,” NASA says.
It’s possible that more impacts have occurred since the InSight landing in 2018, but “were obscured by wind noise or seasonal changes in the atmosphere,” the InSight team says.
The paper’s lead author, Raphael Garcia of the French Institute of Advanced Aeronautics and Space in Toulouse, says such impact sites “are the clocks of the solar system.”
“Scientists can approximate the age of a planet’s surface by measuring impact craters: The more they see, the older the surface,” he says in the news release.
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Mark Price has been a reporter for The Charlotte Observer since 1991, covering beats such as schools, crime, immigration, LGBTQ issues, homelessness and nonprofits. He graduated from the University of Memphis with a major in journalism and art history and a minor in geology.
