In a first, NASA InSight lander shares SOUND of meteorite hitting Mars; LISTEN!

NASA's InSight lander has recorded the seismic waves of a meteorite striking Mars. This is the first time the space agency has captured both seismic as well as acoustic waves from a meteorite impact on Mars. A rock hurtling through space slammed into Mars on September 5, 2021 sending a shock wave through the atmosphere. The US space agency has released the sound on SoundCloud this week. In the 11-second snippet of audio, you can hear the sound of the wind as it blows across Mars and some of the mechanical hum of the lander itself and after a few seconds a loud crashing noise is heard as a meteorite explodes and slams into the planet’s surface.

NASA shared that three distinct “bloops” can be heard in the sound byte representing the sound of the meteoroid entering the atmosphere, breaking up, and then striking the ground.

According to the reports, the meteoroid dropped 53 to 180 miles (85 to 290 kilometres) away from InSight's position in Mars' Elysium Planitia, according to the study published in Nature Geoscience. It hit the Mars atmosphere on September 5, 2021, and exploded into three shards. “After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful,” Ingrid Daubar stated in a Nasa press release. Planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the InSight mission's principal investigator, told news agency Reuters that these seismic measurements give them a completely new tool for investigating Mars, or any other planet they can land a seismometer on."

Listen to the sound of a meteorite hitting Mars below:

Nasa's InSight lander arrived on the Red Planet in 2018. It carried instruments for observing seismic activity above and below the Martian surface. Its seven-foot solar panels have been working at one-tenth of its power due to buildup of dust. The lander's communications technology is expected to fail by this December.