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In fact, it seems Mars is copping an absolute thrashing. Based on the number of nearby impact-related tremors detected by the Mars InSight lander during its tenure, a team of scientists has estimated that Mars experiences almost daily impacts from rocks the size of a basketball smashing into its surface.
"Aligned with orbital imagery, our findings demonstrate that seismology is an excellent tool for measuring impact rates."A crater 150 meters across , the impact of which was detected by Insight in December 2021. The white stuff is water ice. "While new craters can best be seen on flat and dusty terrain where they really stand out, this type of terrain covers less than half of the surface of Mars,"The researchers combined the two sets of data, counting new craters, and tracking them to InSight detections. This allowed them to calculate how many impacts had occurred near the lander in the course of a year, and extrapolate that to a global impact rate.
This revealed that between 280 and 360 impacts that produce a crater more than 8 meters occur on Mars every year – a rate of around one a day. And craters more than 30 meters across appear around once a month.
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