New Impacts

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Among the shift­ing sand dunes and ancient craters of Mars lies a dusty sur­face that’s per­fect for show­ing evi­dence for recent mete­orite impacts.

Explore this image from Mars Recon­nais­sance Orbiter’s HiRISE cam­era of an impact that hap­pened between June 2008 and Feb­ru­ary 2010. The MRO Con­text Imager Team has dis­cov­ered many new impacts on Mars’ sur­face. The dark mark­ing is cre­ated when the mete­orite dis­turbs or removes the lighter sur­face dust. What makes this area bet­ter for find­ing mete­orite impacts than a rocky, moun­tain­ous landscape?

Hun­dreds of small objects, mostly frag­ments of aster­oids and other left­over pieces of the solar sys­tem, impact Mars each year. About the same num­ber of objects encounter Earth each year too but most explode or burn up in Earth’s thicker atmosphere.