(ORDO NEWS) — In September 2021, NASA‘s InSight instrument recorded the faint and even somewhat comical sound of a meteorite. It crashed into the Martian atmosphere, broke into several pieces, and hit the surface hard enough to leave a trail.
The recording was made on September 5, 2021 – that’s when scientists first noticed the collision using the apparatus’s sensors. By this point, they had been tracking such phenomena for some time.
Thanks to information from InSight, it was possible to determine exactly where the rocks hit the ground. When the scientists sent the Mars Orbiter to test the calculations, they found three craters.
Sounds of Mars
You can listen to the audio recording on the official NASA page on the Soundcloud service.
The noise sounds so funny partly because of the way the sound waves from the impact traveled due to the dry atmosphere of Mars, and also because of the distance from the impact site to the craft.
In certain environments, such as deserts, low frequency sounds travel faster than high frequency sounds.
Therefore, an observer close to the impact site will hear the bang, and someone located miles away will hear the sound that NASA called “bloop”.
After three years of waiting for InSight to detect the impact, these craters looked great, says Ingrid Daubar of Brown University.
Daubar is a co-author of a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience published Sept. 18 detailing the results.
Using information from this impact, the scientists were able to go back to the old InSight data and identify three more impacts among the 1,300 quakes already detected by the instrument.
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