![]() ![]() The twin Viking landers of 1976 were NASA’s first life detection mission, and although the results from the experiments failed to detect life in the Martian regolith, and resulted in a long period with fewer Mars missions, it was not the end of the fascination that the Astrobiology science community had for the red planet. However, the exploration of Mars has been intertwined with NASA’s search for life from the beginning. The scientific goals set for InSight ahead of the mission were to investigate the internal structure and processes of Mars, as well as studying seismic activity and meteorite impacts.Astrobiology is a relatively new field of study, where scientists from a variety of disciplines (astronomy, biology, geology, physics, etc.) work together to understand the potential for life to exist beyond Earth. The asteroid belt, an abundant source of space rocks, is located between Mars and Jupiter. The Martian atmosphere is only about 1% as thick as Earth's. ![]() In comparison on Mars, hundreds of impact craters are forming somewhere on the planet's surface every year," Daubar said. ![]() "So meteoroids usually break up and disintegrate in the Earth's atmosphere, forming fireballs that only rarely reach the surface to form a crater. However, Earth has a much thicker atmosphere that protects the planet. Mars is about twice as likely as Earth to have its atmosphere hit by a meteoroid - the name for a space rock before it strikes the surface. "And it may be the same sensors will do it, because the spare sensors of InSight are currently integrated in the Farside Seismic Suite instrument for a flight to the moon in 2025," Garcia added, referring to an instrument due to be placed near the lunar south pole on the side of the moon permanently facing away from Earth. "The moon is also a target for future meteor impact detection," said planetary scientist and study lead author Raphael Garcia of the University of Toulouse's ISAE-SUPAERO institute of aeronautics and space. The three-legged InSight - its name is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport - landed in 2018 in a vast and relatively flat plain just north of the Martian equator called Elysium Planitia. The researchers believe that now the seismic signature of such impacts has been discovered they expect to find more contained in InSight's data, going back to 2018. We can apply this information to better understand InSight's entire catalog of seismic events, and use the results on other planets and moons, too," said Brown University planetary scientist Ingrid Daubar, a co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. "We can connect a known source type, location and size to what the seismic signal looks like. One exploded into at least three pieces that each gouged their own craters. They landed between 53 miles (85 km) and 180 miles (290 km) from InSight's location. The space rocks InSight tracked - one landing in 2020 and the other three in 2021 - were relatively modest in size, estimated to weigh up to about 440 pounds (200 kg), with diameters of up to about 20 inches (50 cm) and leaving craters of up to about 24 feet (7.2 meters) wide. ![]() "These seismic measurements give us a completely new tool for investigating Mars, or any other planet we can land a seismometer on," said planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the InSight mission's principal investigator. ![]()
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