NASA details meteorite strike on Mars

STORY: This is the sound of a meteoroid hitting Mars

It was picked up by NASA’s InSight lander

which has been on Mars since 2018

Impact craters let scientists learn about

the interior and atmosphere of Mars

One crater measured 490 feet wide,

about two city blocks across

[INGRID DAUBA, INSIGHT IMPACT SCIENCE LEAD]

"Most exciting of all, we saw clearly in high resolution images that a whole lot of water-ice have been exposed by this impact. You can see in this fly-over video of the 3D data boulder-size chunks of ice in the crater's ejecta as well as splashes of ice thrown across the landscape outside the crater. This was surprising because this is the warmest spot on Mars, the closest to the equator we've ever seen water-ice."

InSight also detected 1,318 marsquakes

showing Mars is seismically active

But the lander will soon stop operating

as dust accumulates on its solar panels

[BRUCE BANERD, INSIGHT PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR]

"What we believe is in the next short amount of time, perhaps somewhere between four and eight weeks, as best we can predict, we expect the Lander to not have enough power to operate any longer and we'll lose contact with the spacecraft."