Mars is hit by basketball-sized meteorites daily - study

Mars is being hit by space rocks five times more often than anyone previously suspected, according to new data from planetary scientists. Meteorites the size of a basketball fall to Mars every day and really shake it up.

Among the more than 1,300 Martian tremors recorded by NASA's InSight rover during its stay on Mars, 86 of them were not the restless stretching and settling of the planet itself, but sudden impacts of fast meteorites crashing into the Martian soil, Inverse writes.

Geraldine Zenhäusern, a planetary scientist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and her colleagues published their work in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Immediately before several martian shocks, NASA's InSight picked up sound waves from falling meteors through the rarefied Martian atmosphere - or, more technically, InSight measured how these sound waves in the lower air layers pushed and pulled against the ground below. And the shocks themselves were short, sharp bursts of motion, averaging less than a quarter of a second. On the other hand, a normal Mars shake can last several seconds.

When the scientists analyzed the rest of the InSight data, they found 80 more such earthquakes lasting a fraction of a second, caused by high-speed collisions with space rocks. Assuming that the area within the range of InSight's sensors is normal, this means that chunks of rock the size of basketballs are slamming into Mars at high speed, tearing out craters at least 7 meters wide, 280 to 360 times a year. And even larger meteorites, large enough to leave craters over 30 meters wide, fall somewhere on the planet about once a month.

"While new craters are best seen on flat and dusty terrain where they really stand out, this type of terrain covers less than half of Mars' surface. InSight's sensitive seismometer, however, was able to hear every impact within the reach of the lander," Zenhausern said in a statement.

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