A strange sound, documented by the US space agency, NASA, was issued by a meteor that was sailing in the atmosphere of Mars before crashing on the surface of the Red Planet. How did this happen?
According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the recording, posted Sept. 19 to YouTube, combines “seismic and acoustic waves” detected when a space rock hit Mars on Sept. 5, 2021.
The sound lasts only about 3 seconds, and begins with the sound of a rock flying in the sky and ends with “beats”.
“This was the first time that the sound of a meteorite impact on another planet has been captured, and that may not be what we expect,” the lab says.
The laboratory explains the nature of the image that you will hear “three strikes, representing distinct moments of impact,” and explains that the meteor enters the atmosphere of Mars, then explodes into pieces, after which it collides with the Earth.
The strange sound is caused by an atmospheric effect also observed in deserts on Earth, where low-pitched sounds arrive before high-pitched sounds, according to the lab.
Sound on ???? These “bloops” are the sound of a meteoroid impact on Mars – the first time it has ever been recorded! NASA…
Posted by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday, September 19, 2022
Astronomers comment that the meteorite, a term referring to space rocks before they hit Earth, exploded into at least three pieces, leaving three distinct craters.
NASA says its InSight lander captured the seismic waves and the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the impact site and photographed “three dark spots on the surface.”
A peer-reviewed research paper published by Nature Geoscience on September 19 indicated that NASA has recorded four meteorite impacts on Mars since August 2021, “between 53 and 180 miles (85 and 290 km) from the InSight site.
The result was that the four collisions produced earthquakes in the range of 2.0 degrees, and NASA says: “The researchers were kind of puzzled that they did not discover more impacts of meteorites on Mars.”
NASA says that the red planet (Mars) is located next to the main asteroid belt of the solar system, which provides a large stock of space rocks to sabotage the surface of the planet.
The agency adds that “because the thickness of the Martian atmosphere is only 1 percent, as that of the Earth’s, more meteorites pass through it without disintegrating.”
The InSight team expects more impacts to occur since InSight’s landing in 2018, but they have been “obscured by wind noise or seasonal changes in the atmosphere.”
These collision sites “are the clocks of the solar system,” says the paper’s lead researcher, Rafael Garcia, of the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space in Toulouse.
“Scientists can approximate the age of the planet’s surface by calculating the craters that affected it, the more they see, the older the surface,” he adds in a press release.