The Martian lander has been looking for seismic and acoustic waves from impacts since 2018.
NASA's confirmed the location of these impacts from orbit. The spacecraft, which launched in 2005, initially took black and white images of the regions with its Context Camera, revealing dark patches on the Martian surface. After pinpointing these impact sites, MRO followed up by collecting color images and close-ups using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera .
"After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful," Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island and part of the team that made the discovery, said in aPlanetary scientists are confused as to why InSight hasn't detected more space rock impacts on the Red Planet.
InSight scientists had thought impacts might be hidden by noise from the wind on the Red Planet or by seasonal changes in the atmosphere. Researchers will now revisit InSight data to search for the seismic fingerprints of other space rock impacts.
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