For years, NASA has been searching for the sound of a meteorite crashing into the planet Mars. It’s a mission accomplished by the InSight lander, a rover carrying a seismograph that was able to pick up seismic waves four times between 2020 and 2021, when a space rock crashed into Mars.
This was the first time that seismic and acoustic activity might be heard and detected on Mars, NASA explained. And the recording captured on September 5 is the first whose cause might be identified as that of the impact of a meteorite.
Contrary to what one might have imagined, it is a noise that is brutal at first then very soft, similar to a “bloup”. These three “bloup” correspond respectively to the moment when the meteorite crosses the atmosphere of Mars, then to its explosion when it crashes on the surface of the planet. The strange noise is due, according to NASA, to a “particular” effect of the atmosphere of Mars, which occurs when low-pitched sounds arrive before higher-pitched ones.
