NASA captures rare massive meteorite impact on Mars with dual spacecraft

On December 24th, NASA's InSight lander felt the ground shake beneath it—a magnitude-4 tremor that rippled through the Martian soil. The spacecraft's seismic instruments recorded the jolt, but the scientists studying the data faced an immediate puzzle: was this a marsquake, the kind of seismic activity that occurs naturally on rocky planets, or something else entirely?

It took months to know for certain. In February 2022, researchers working with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter—a spacecraft that has been circling the planet for years—spotted something new on the surface: an enormous crater, roughly 150 meters across and 21 meters deep, in a region called Amazonis Planitia. By comparing images taken before and after December 24th, the team could confirm what the seismic data had suggested. A meteorite had struck Mars. The tremor InSight detected was the planet's response to impact.

The meteoroid itself was estimated to measure between 5 and 12 meters across—small enough that it would have burned up entirely in Earth's atmosphere, but large enough to survive the thin Martian air, which is only about 1 percent as dense as our own. When it hit, the collision was violent enough to excavate material from deep underground. Debris from the explosion scattered across the landscape, with some fragments traveling as far as 37 kilometers from the impact site. Most remarkably, the blast exposed chunks of subsurface ice—water ice buried beneath the Martian regolith, closer to the equator than scientists had ever documented before.

This discovery carries weight beyond the immediate scientific interest. For NASA's long-term plans to send human explorers to Mars, subsurface ice near the equator represents something precious: a source of water for drinking, for agriculture, and for producing rocket fuel. The equatorial region is already attractive to mission planners because it is warmer than other parts of the planet. Now it offered something more—the raw materials astronauts would need to survive and work there.

The impact itself ranks among the largest ever observed on Mars since NASA began exploring the planet. Older craters dot the Martian surface, some far larger, but they formed long before any spacecraft arrived to witness them. This one was different. InSight detected it in real time. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured its aftermath in photographs. Two scientific papers describing the event and its implications were published in the journal Science, offering an unprecedented record of a major impact unfolding in the modern era of Mars exploration.

Ingrid Daubar, a scientist at Brown University who leads InSight's impact science working group, called the moment historic. "It is unprecedented to find a new impact of this size," she said. "It is an exciting moment in geological history, and we get to witness it." Her colleague Liliya Posiolova, who oversees orbital operations and science at the company that built and operates the orbiter's cameras, described the first time she saw the impact imagery: the enormous crater, the exposed ice, the dramatic blast zone preserved in Martian dust. She found herself imagining what it must have been like to see the meteorite arrive, the atmospheric explosion, the debris hurled across miles of landscape.

The timing of this discovery carries a note of urgency. InSight's solar panels have accumulated dust over the months, draining the lander's power reserves. The spacecraft was expected to shut down within weeks of the October 2022 publication of these findings, ending its mission after nearly four years on the surface. Since landing in November 2018, InSight had detected 1,318 marsquakes, including several triggered by smaller meteorite impacts. But this December event was the first to produce surface waves—a type of seismic wave that ripples along the top of a planet's crust. Those waves, scientists discovered, could be used to map the structure of Mars's interior in new ways, revealing details about the composition and architecture of the planet's crustal layers.

As InSight's power faded, the data it had gathered—combined with the orbital imagery showing the crater and the exposed ice—would help scientists refine their understanding of how often large impacts occur on Mars, and how that frequency shapes the planet's geological timeline. For future explorers planning to live and work on Mars, the ice near the equator offered both a practical resource and a reminder of the dynamic, still-active world they would be entering.