Current impact rates at Mars could be 2-10 times higher than previously estimated, depending on the size of the meteoroids, according to new research.
“It’s possible Mars is more geologically active than we thought, which holds implications for the age and evolution of the planet’s surface,” said Brown University’s Dr. Ingrid Daubar.
“Our results are based on a small number of examples available to us, but the estimate of the current impact rate suggests the planet is getting hit much more frequently than we can see using imaging alone.”
Dr. Daubar and colleagues used the highly sensitive seismometer onboard NASA’s InSight lander to identify eight new impact craters from meteoroids not previously seen from orbit.
The frequency of these cosmic collisions challenges existing notions about how often meteoroids hit the surface of Mars and suggests a need to revise current Martian cratering models to incorporate higher impact rates, especially from smaller meteoroids.
The findings could ultimately reshape current understandings of the Martian surface — as batterings from small meteoroids continue to sculpt it — and the impact history of not just Mars, but other planets.
“This is going to require us to rethink some of the models the science community uses to estimate the age of planetary surfaces throughout the entire Solar System,” Dr. Daubar said.
Six of the craters the researchers detected were near the site where the stationary InSight set down.
The two distant impacts they identified from the data were the two biggest impacts ever detected by scientists, even after decades of watching from orbit.
The larger impacts, each leaving a crater roughly the size of a football field, came just 97 days apart, underscoring the higher frequency of these types of geological events.
“This size impact, we would expect to happen maybe once every couple of decades, maybe even once in a lifetime, but here we have two of them that are just over 90 days…
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