Historic! Meteoroid strike on Mars! NASA InSight Lander captures UNIQUE moment

While meteoroids, small pieces of asteroids or comets, keep hitting and getting burnt in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, an actual strike to the ground is a rare event. If these meteoroids survive the atmosphere, and hit the Earth, they are called meteorites. These strikes happen on every planet in the solar system. This is why the latest observation by the NASA InSight Lander, which went to Mars in November 2018 to study the deep interior of the planet, is extremely special. The robotic lander had the opportunity to witness a strike on the red planet and noticed the minutest changes the planet underwent after the impact. Read on to know all about it.

NASA reported about this recent discovery in a blog post where it revealed that when it struck Mars, “the lander felt the ground shake during the impact while cameras aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the yawning new crater from space”.

Mars gets struck by a meteoroid, InSight Lander witnesses

While experiencing such a moment itself is a great achievement, the lander also managed to collect some interesting data as well. The meteoroid struck the red planet in December 2021, but initially the scientists were not sure about it. As the Lander did not technically see the event happening, what it felt was an earthquake of magnitude 4.

Scientists later looked at the before-and-after images from NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and determined that the quake emerged from a meteoroid strike. According to the report, the meteoroid is expected to be between 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters) in size.

Interestingly, the same sized meteoroid would have burnt up in Earth’s atmosphere, but since Mars has a thin atmosphere layer protecting the planet, the space rock was able to hit the surface.

Notably, the images and seismic data revealed that this was one of the largest craters ever witnessed forming on any place in the solar system.