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(Photo : Pixabay / BrunoAlbino) (craters)
A team of astronomers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California have detected that a single meteorite was maybe responsible for making not just one, but billions of subsequent craters on the Martian surface.
Along with the main 2.3 million-year-old crater called Corinto, which is expanded over 8.6 miles across, the collision many several billion secondary craters by sending up a big plume of rocks after it hit the floor, New Scientist reports. These rocks then triggered a chain reaction, adding even more craters as they came hitting back down.
By examining satellite images, JPL’s Matthew Golombek and his companions guess the number of craters triggered by the blast and came to the conclusion that Corinto had anywhere between 1.3 and 3 billion “secondaries,” each of which at least 33 feet across.
The study could contribute to figure out complicated geological processes on the surface of Mars and how its landscapes and composition have changed over time — a specifically essential region of inquiry, given our efforts to send astronauts there in the upcoming time.
The region pockmarked by the billions of craters is totally dense, expanded across 540,000 square miles — which randomly involves the landing spot of NASA’s InSight Mars lander.
“Measuring the number of secondaries is essential to figure out how a relatively small crater could likely eject that much material during the cratering process,” Golombek told New Scientist.
Other, far more previous meteorite effects have resulted in equally fascinating findings. In 2022, InSight spotted a massive marsquake — the planet’s equivalent of an earthquake — which became the consequence of one of the largest visible meteors to have struck Mars, some 2,000 miles away from the lander.
The influence was so powerful, in fact, that it blasted up chunks of underground ice.
