Mars is bombarded by more than 200 small asteroids or bits of comets per year forming craters at least 3.9 meters across, NASA said.
Scientists using images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have identified 248 new impact sites on parts of the Martian surface in the past decade.
MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera took pictures of the fresh craters at sites where before-and-after images by other cameras bracketed when the impacts occurred.
This combination provided a new way to make direct measurements of the impact rate on Mars. This will lead to better age estimates of recent features on Mars, some of which may have been the result of climate change.
“It’s exciting to find these new craters right after they form,” said Ingrid Daubar of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead author of the paper.
“It reminds you Mars is an active planet, and we can study processes that are happening today,” said Daubar.
These asteroids or comet fragments typically are no more than 1 to 2 meters in diameter. Space rocks, too small to reach the ground on Earth, cause craters on Mars because the Red Planet has a much thinner atmosphere.
HiRISE targeted places where dark spots had appeared during the time between images taken by the spacecraft’s Context Camera (CTX) or cameras on other orbiters. The new estimate of cratering rate is based on a portion of the 248 new craters detected.
It comes from a systematic check of a dusty fraction of the planet with CTX since late 2006. The impacts disturb the dust, creating noticeable blast zones. In this part of the research, 44 fresh impact sites were identified.
The meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February was about 10 times bigger than the objects that dug the fresh Martian craters.
Estimates of the rate at which new craters appear serve as scientists’ best yardstick for estimating the ages of exposed landscape surfaces on Mars and other worlds.
Daubar and co-authors calculated a rate for how frequently new craters at least 3.9 meters in diameter are excavated. The rate is equivalent to an average of one each year on each area of the Martian surface roughly the size of the US state of Texas.
“Mars now has the best-known current rate of cratering in the solar system,” said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, a co-author on the paper.