NASA has shared the sound of a meteoroid crashing into Mars. It’s the first time for seismic signals from a meteoroid impact to be detected on another planet.
The sound of a meteoroid crashing into Mars has been captured by NASA’s InSight lander, marking the first time for seismic signals from a meteoroid impact to be detected on another planet.
The InSight Lander was sent to Mars in 2018 to detect so-called “marsquakes,” in this case seismic activity happening beneath the surface of the red planet. But its highly sensitive detection tool also picked up a meteoroid slamming into Mars’ surface last year, and you can hear it happen in the video below.
A new paper published this week in Nature Geoscience reports on the impact, which took place on September 5, 2021.
In fact, there were three separate strikes, as the space rock exploded into three parts when it hit Mars’ atmosphere.
According to the data, the meteoroids struck the martian surface between 53 and 180 miles (85 and 290 kilometers) from InSight’s location.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing InSight’s mission, said the audio of one of the strikes sounds like a “bloop” due to “a peculiar atmospheric effect heard when bass sounds arrive before high-pitched sounds.
