Meteor strikes impacting the surface of Mars could shake the Red Planet far more deeply than previously thought.
The revelation came after planetary geologists used an AI algorithm to link the appearance of new impact craters in images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter with seismic information from the InSight lander.
More on Mars
Insight into Mars meteor impacts
NASA’s InSight lander spent four years on Mars listening out for ‘marsquakes’.
By the time it retired in 2022, it had discovered 1,300 such seismic events, many from meteor impacts.
In some cases, astronomers were able to match these with recent impacts detected by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
As Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographs the same areas over and over again, it’s possible to find new craters by comparing old images with new ones.
However, it would take a human many years to analyse the thousands of images, so the InSight team utilised an AI-driven program to speed up the job.
What the A.I. found
The program uncovered 123 craters on Mars, 49 of which were matched with marsquakes detected by InSight.
Initially, the researchers focused on a 21.5-metre (71ft) crater in a region known as Cerberus Fossae.
The team were surprised to find that the crater was 1,640km (1,019 miles) away from where InSight picked up the shock.
The energy of the wave suggested the impact was much closer, as Mars’s crust tends to dampen such waves.
The further an energy wave travels through the crust, the weaker it gets.
That suggests this impact took a more direct route through the planet’s mantle.
"We used to think the energy detected from the vast majority of seismic events was stuck travelling within the Martian crust," says Constantinos Charalambous from Imperial College London, who works on InSight.
"This finding shows a deeper, faster path – call it a seismic highway – through the mantle, allowing quakes to reach more distant regions of the planet."
