SPACE: This is the first time such a sound has been captured. Thanks to its InSight lander, The NASA just announced that they recorded the sound of a meteoroid hitting Mars. The broadcast excerpt allows you to listen to your entry into the red planet’s atmosphere, then its explosion and its impact on the ground, as you can hear in the video at the top of the article.
The meteoroid in question is one of four space rocks detected by the InSight lander’s seismometer that crashed into Mars between 2020 and 2021. The rock crashed into Mars on September 5, 2021, and exploded into three fragments, each one of which left craters.
NASA later used your space probe Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to fly over the impact area and confirm the location. With its camera, the machine managed to find the three craters and capture them in black and white. The orbiter team then used the camera “High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment” (HiRISE), for a color close-up of the craters, of which the images are here. NASA notes that the meteorite may have left additional craters on the surface of Mars, but these are too small to capture images.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
This collage shows three meteor strikes, detected by NASA’s InSight lander seismometer and captured with its HiRISE camera. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
a meteorite that does “bloop”
This new NASA footage of a meteor hitting Mars makes an unexpected sound. One would think that a meteor crashing into the surface of mars results in a gigantic explosion, similar to an explosion. Still, the resulting footage looks strange.” blop blop”.
According to NASA, this sound is due to a particular atmospheric effect, similar to a phenomenon observed in deserts on Earth. After sunset, the atmosphere retains some of the heat accumulated during the day. Sound waves pass through this heated atmosphere at different speeds, depending on their frequency. Therefore, bass sounds arrive before treble sounds. An observer close to the impact would hear a “pop”while someone several miles away would hear the low-pitched sounds first, creating a “bloop”.
These data are valuable for a better understanding the red planet and its composition. But the InSight lander won’t be long: dust buildup on the solar panels will soon make it inoperable. The spacecraft arrived on Mars in November 2018 and is expected to stop between October this year and January 2023.
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