Skip to main content

Listen to the sound of a meteoroid striking Mars

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.

Hear Meteoroid Striking Mars, Captured by NASA’s InSight Lander

A new paper published this week in Nature Geoscience reports on the impact, which took place on September 5, 2021.

Recommended Videos

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.”

It elaborates: “After sunset, the atmosphere retains some heat accumulated during the day. Sound waves travel through this heated atmosphere at different speeds, depending on their frequency. As a result, lower-pitched sounds arrive before high-pitched sounds. An observer close to the impact would hear a ‘bang,’ while someone many miles away would hear the bass sounds first, creating a ‘bloop.’”

After determining the precise impact locations, NASA used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to get a color close-up of the craters.

Craters caused by a meteoroid impact on Mars.
This collage shows three other meteoroid impacts that were detected by the seismometer on NASA’s InSight lander and captured by the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its HiRISE camera. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.

HiRISE sees wavelengths the human eye is unable to detect, so scientists change the camera’s filters to enhance the color of the image. “The areas that appear blue around the craters are where dust has been removed or disturbed by the blast of the impact,” NASA explained. “Martian dust is bright and red, so removing it makes the surface appear relatively dark and blue.”

While the detection of meteoroid strikes is an exciting development for the InSight team, the lander’s main work has been to detect marsquakes, with its sensors detecting more than 1,300 since it went into operation in 2018. In May, it detected the strongest quake ever observed on another planet.

Sadly, InSight will soon end its operations as a gradual accumulation of dust on its solar panels is preventing it from gathering enough power to work effectively.

Still, InSight’s team has lots of data from the mission, which it deems a huge success.

In fact, the team is still sifting through much of it, partly in the hope of finding evidence of other meteoroid strikes that it might’ve missed. It said other impacts may have been obscured by noise from wind or by seasonal changes in the atmosphere, but now that it has a better understanding of the distinctive seismic signature of a rock striking Mars, it’s confident it will find more examples of meteoroid strikes through further analysis of InSight’s past data.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
NASA’s ‘stuck’ astronauts have finally left the space station
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

After a nine-month stay that was only supposed to last eight days, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have finally left the International Space Station (ISS) and are on their way home.

Seated inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft alongside fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, Williams and Wilmore undocked from the orbital outpost at 1:05 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 18.

Read more
SpaceX will launch Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robot to Mars next year
Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot by Tesla.

The year 2025 is going to be pivotal for Tesla’s humanoid robot plans, if the words of CEO Elon Musk are to be believed. But next year could mark an astronomical milestone for the company’s Optimus robot, in quite the literal sense.
Taking to X, Musk mentioned in a post that SpaceX will put an Optimus robot on Mars atop its flagship Starship rocket by the end of 2026. Just over a week ago, the Starship broke apart following a launch test, the second such failure this year.
“Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1859078074303713447

This won’t be the first time Musk is making such a claim. Back in November last year, Musk mentioned that SpaceX was capable of sending “several uncrewed Starships” to the red planet within a couple of years and that the payload would include Optimus robots.
Tesla introduced a refined version of the Optimus robot at a glitzy event late in 2024. At the event, Musk told the crowd that Optimus was “the biggest product ever of any kind.” It was later reported that the robots were remotely operated by humans at the event.
Later, during the company’s Q4 2024 earnings calls, Musk shed more light on production plans, adding that the product has a revenue potential higher than $10 trillion. He also mentioned plans to manufacture thousands of humanoid robots in 2025.

Read more
SpaceX scrubs Crew-10 launch attempt 40 minutes from liftoff
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for the Crew-10 mission.

SpaceX and NASA have stood down from Wednesday's 7:48 p.m. launch attempt of Crew-10 to the International Space Station (ISS) due to a technical issue on the ground.

With the four crew members strapped into their seats inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket at the Kennedy Space Center, the countdown clock was stopped at 7:06 p.m. ET, and at the same time the call was made to scrub the launch attempt.

Read more