For the first time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has captured the strange sound of a meteoroid as it enters the atmosphere of another planet and crashes to the ground.
The recording, which was posted on YouTube on September 19, combines the “seismic and acoustic waves” that were detected when a space rock collided with Mars on September 5, 2021, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said. NASA in a press release. Lasting only about three seconds, the sound begins with a hiss—that of the rock flying through the sky—and ends with several “whistles.”
“It is the first time that the sound of a meteoroid impact has been captured when it takes place on another planet, and it may not sound as one would expect it to sound,” the lab reported.
“Three ‘whistles’ can be heard representing perceptible moments of the impact: the meteoroid as it enters the Martian atmosphere, as it bursts into pieces, and finally as it hits the ground. The peculiar sound is caused by an atmospheric effect that has also been observed in deserts on Earth, where low-intensity sounds arrive before louder sounds.”
The meteoroid — “the term for space rocks before they hit the surface” — exploded into at least three pieces, leaving three noticeable craters, the scientists said.
According to NASA, the InSight lander recorded the seismic waves and the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the impact site and photographed “three dark spots on the surface.”
According to an article published on September 19 in the specialized magazine Nature GeoscienceNASA has recorded four meteoroid impacts on Mars since August 2021, “between 53 and 180 miles from the InSigh location.”
The four have provoked the calls marterremotos (a kind of earthquakes) with a magnitude of 2.0, experts said.
“Scientists wonder why more meteoroid impacts have not been detected on Mars,” NASA said.
“The Red Planet is close to the main asteroid belt of the solar system, which causes a large number of space rocks to affect the surface of the planet. Since Mars’ atmosphere is only one percent thicker than Earth’s, more meteoroids pass through without breaking up,” NASA said.
It is possible that more impacts have occurred since InSight was installed in 2018, “neutralized by wind noise or seasonal changes in the atmosphere,” the InSight team said.
The paper’s lead author, Raphael Garcia, of the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace, in Toulouse, France, said the sites of such impacts “are the clocks of the solar system.”
“Scientists can estimate the age of a planet’s surface by counting the craters left by its impacts: the more there are, the older the surface,” Garcia said in the statement.
Translation of Jorge Posada