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Newly formed craters on Mars located using seismic and acoustic wave data from InSight

Abstract

Meteoroid impacts shape planetary surfaces by forming new craters and alter atmospheric composition. During atmospheric entry and impact on the ground, meteoroids excite transient acoustic and seismic waves. However, new crater formation and the associated impact-induced mechanical waves have yet to be observed jointly beyond Earth. Here we report observations of seismic and acoustic waves from the NASA InSight lander’s seismometer that we link to four meteoroid impact events on Mars observed in spacecraft imagery. We analysed arrival times and polarization of seismic and acoustic waves to estimate impact locations, which were subsequently confirmed by orbital imaging of the associated craters. Crater dimensions and estimates of meteoroid trajectories are consistent with waveform modelling of the recorded seismograms. With identified seismic sources, the seismic waves can be used to constrain the structure of the Martian interior, corroborating previous crustal structure models, and constrain scaling relationships between the distance and amplitude of impact-generated seismic waves on Mars, supporting a link between the seismic moment of impacts and the vertical impactor momentum. Our findings demonstrate the capability of planetary seismology to identify impact-generated seismic sources and constrain both impact processes and planetary interiors.

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Fig. 1: Sketch of meteor impact phenomena and their recordings by InSight.
Fig. 2: Impacts observed from orbit.
Fig. 3: Crust structure and impact seismic sources.

Data availability

SEIS data are referenced at https://doi.org/10.18715/SEIS.INSIGHT.XB_2016. Orbital imaging data are available in the Planetary Data System (PDS) at https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/mro.html for CTX and https://www.uahirise.org/ for HiRISE. The Mars Climate Database is available at http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/. The seismic catalogue of Marsquake Service is available at https://science.seis-insight.eu. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

All the computations made in this paper are based on codes described in papers either already published or in revision that are cited in the reference list. The full wave seismic/acoustic code SPECFEM2D-DG20 is available at https://github.com/samosa-project/specfem2d-dg. The Separate Fragments Model is published at Schwarz, D., Collins, G.S., Newland, E.L., Coleman, M., 2022. Fragment-Cloud Model: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6806015. The Monte Carlo code, post-processing code and synthetic data are published at Collins, G.S., Schwarz, D., Coleman, M., Newland, E.L., 2022. Meteoroid Fragmentation in the Martian Atmosphere and the Formation of Crater Clusters: Source Code and Data https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6566345.

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Acknowledgements

This study is InSight contribution number 241 and LA-UR-22-25144. The French authors acknowledge the French Space Agency CNES and ANR (ANR-14-CE36-0012-02 and ANR-19-CE31-0008-08) for funding the InSight Science analysis. I.J.D. was supported by NASA grant 80NSSC20K0971. P.L., Z.X., S.M., M.F., T.K. and M. Plasman acknowledge IdEx Université de Paris ANR-18-IDEX-0001. N.W. and G.S.C. are funded by the UK Space Agency (Grants ST/S001514/1 and ST/T002026/1). N.A.T. and A.H. are funded by the UK Space Agency (grants ST/R002096/1 and ST/W002523/1). M.F. is funded by the Center for Space and Earth Science of Los Alamos National Laboratory. S.C.S., N.L.D., C.D. and G.Z., acknowledge support from ETHZ through the ETH+ funding scheme (ETH+2 19-1: ‘Planet MARS’). A.R., K.M., E.K.S. and T.N. are funded by the Australian Research Council (DE180100584, DP180100661 and DP180100661). W.B.B., M. Panning, and L. Martire were supported by the NASA InSight mission and funds from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant 80NM0018D0004). N.C.S. was supported by funds from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant 80NSSC18K1628). The authors thank CALMIP (Toulouse, France, project #p1404) computing centre for HPC resources. We acknowledge NASA, CNES, their partner agencies and institutions (UKSA, SSO, DLR, JPL, IPGP-CNRS, ETHZ, IC and MPS-MPG) and the flight operations team at JPL, SISMOC, MSDS, IRIS-DMC and PDS for providing SEED SEIS data. We are grateful to the CTX and HiRISE operations teams who planned and acquired the orbital images of the new impacts.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

R.F.G. provided seismic locations of impacts and full waveform simulations. I.J.D., L.P. and G.S. planned orbital imaging acquisition and performed analysis of these images. E.B. and M.B. provided the seismological analysis and impact interpretation of seismic data. G.S.C. and N.W. provided impact trajectory analysis, impactor momentum estimates and amplitude scaling of seismic response for different planets. P.L. provided the analysis of the seismic source time function and the comparison of waveforms between Mars and Moon data. A.S. provided atmosphere models and data analysis of APSS sensors validating these models. L.R., Z.X., L. Martire, M.F. and O.K. provided analysis of acoustic signal propagation in the atmosphere of Mars. A.R., K.M., E.K.S. and T.N. provided analysis of crater cluster dispersion. C.C., S.C., J.F.C., S.C.S., N.L.D, C.D., A.H., T.K., M. Plasman and G.Z. provided seismic event detections and seismic arrival times in the framework of Marsquake Service front-line team. S.M. and L. Margerin provided seismic arrival times and seismic waveforms analysis of impact events. R.L. provided operational support on SEIS data and a sonification of SEIS records. N.A.T. provided scaling relations between seismic and impact parameters. N.C.S. provided analysis of impact cluster effect on seismic source estimates. D.G., B.F. and M. Panning provided constructive analysis of the paper and text proofreading. M.M. is principal investigator of the CTX camera. P.L. is principal investigator of the SEIS instrument. W.B.B. is principal investigator of the InSight mission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raphael F. Garcia.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Hiroaki (Haruna) Shiraishi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tamara Goldin, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 SEIS data of event S0793a.

a ground velocity records of vertical and horizontal component in impact direction (280° back azimuth) filtered in the 0.5–8 Hz frequency range. b spectrogram of vertical ground velocity. c coherence as a function of time and frequency and d phase at maximum coherence between vertical and horizontal ground velocity. The low frequency signals with a 0° phase shift between 60 and 250 seconds are due to wind related noise. Times are relative to ‘Event Start’ time (Table 1).

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 SEIS data of event S0981c.

a ground velocity records of vertical and horizontal component in impact direction (180° back azimuth) filtered in the 0.5–8 Hz frequency range. b spectrogram of vertical ground velocity. c coherence as a function of time and frequency and d phase at maximum coherence between vertical and horizontal ground velocity. The low frequency signals with a -170° phase shift between 350 and 800 seconds are due to wind related noise.Times are relative to ‘Event Start’ time (Table 1).

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 SEIS data of event S0533a.

a ground velocity records of vertical and horizontal component in impact direction (0° back azimuth) filtered in the 0.5–8 Hz frequency range. b spectrogram of vertical ground velocity. c coherence as a function of time and frequency and d phase at maximum coherence between vertical and horizontal ground velocity. Times are relative to ‘Event Start’ time (Table 1).

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 4 3D simulation of acoustic rays for S0986c event.

a Local sound speed and efficient sound speed profiles from MCD atmospheric model at location and date of S0986c event toward 295° azimuthal direction. b Acoustic rays trajectories traced from the impact source and launched with an angle varying from 0° to 90° (see color-code) with a 0.1° step. The impact source and the receiver (InSight station) are marked with a triangle and a star, respectively. We highlight that only acoustic waves trapped close to the surface propagate ground-to-ground. c 3D ray tracing top-down view shows that acoustic trapped waves do not deviate from the great circle path highlighted with a dashed grey line. In contrast, the cross-wind effect is visible on upward rays, due to the larger high altitude winds. d and e: same as b and c, considering the acoustic source of A2 at 15 km altitude along the meteor trajectory and marked with a star. Downward launch angles are negative.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison between simulated and observed vertical and horizontal Vz/Vx spectrograms.

Spectrogram of simulated (a,b) and observed (c,d) vertical (a,c) and horizontal (b,d) ground velocity along impact direction for event S0986c. Modeling is performed with SPECFEM2D-DG-LNS software.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 6 Dispersion of acoustic waves trapped in the surface waveguide.

The atmospheric sound speed models and the synthetic and measured group velocities of acoustic guided waves of S0793a, S0981c and S0986c. a b c the atmosphere models of effective sound speed (red dashed lines) and the staircase approximation (black lines) for computation of the group velocities. d e f the synthetic group velocities (red curve) from the staircase approximation and the group velocity measurements (gray background) from the real data. The gray color intensity indicates the probability of the measurements.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 7 Meteoroid fragmentation in the atmosphere for S0986c event.

a Size and relative location of craters in the cluster associated with event S0986c, where each circle represents a single crater to scale. b An example of a comparable simulated crater cluster with a similar number of craters >1-m diameter, effective diameter, median separation between craters and aspect ratio of best-fit ellipse (blue). c The deposition of meteoroid kinetic energy in the atmosphere associated with the model cluster in b, with peak energy deposition at 16.5 km altitude (dashed line).

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 8 Estimate of the frequency cutoff of the impact seismic source.

Displacement spectral amplitudes of P waves of the S0793a event (a) and the S0986c event (b). Both spectra, in black, are made with a 5 seconds window on deticked 100 sps VBBZ data starting at the MQS P arrival time. The noise spectra in red are estimated by the minimum amplitude of three 5 seconds spectra, computed just before the MQS P arrival time. Note that both the noise before and the signal after the P arrival time of S0793a are corrupted by donks, whose energy appears above 15 Hz, while donks are absent from the records of S0986c around the P arrival time. The green dashed line provides the attenuation cutoff for a Qp ~ 3300, while the continuous green lines are proposed fit for the f-3 source function already proposed for Lunar impacts. An overshoot peaking at 5 Hz and with amplitude increasing with the yield might be compatible with the P wave spectra but need future observations or analysis for confirmation.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 9 Comparison between Mars and Lunar seismic signals from impact and constraints on seismic properties and impact seismic source.

Panel a is for the Martian S0986c impact, while panel b is for LEM12 impact recorded on the Apollo 12 LP vertical seismometer. Red lines in panels a and b are the envelope, while the green lines are the modeled envelopes. Panel c shows the acceptable solutions, as function of length scale and of the effective source ratio between the two impactors. The Black circle provides the Lunar Diffusion length scale measured for the LEM impact (1.93 km) as well as the 2.57 ratio between the Apollo LEM vertical momentum (230150 Ns) and the estimated one for S0986c (89 500 Ns). Variance reductions better than 98% (in gray in panel c) are obtained with a larger attenuation as the one found on the Moon and suggest larger diffusion length scale, depending on the strength of the site effects on the Moon as compared to Mars.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 10 P-wave amplitude scaling relationship.

We propose an updated least squares amplitude-distance scaling relationship38,39 where peak vertical ground velocity of first arrival P-wave is normalized by total impact momentum (which is scaled by 106 Ns), shown as a solid line. The distance from impact is given in km. The dashed lines indicate the factor of two uncertainties. Data points shown include the artificial impacts on the Moon (peak first arrival amplitude between 1–16 Hz65); the Carancas impact (peak first arrival amplitude between 1–16 Hz66,67), and the three events on Mars identified by InSight as impacts (peak first arrival amplitude between 3–8 Hz). The data are provided as measured values +/− uncertainty estimates.

Source data

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 1 and Figs. 1 and 2.

Supplementary Video 1

Video of sonified records of ground vertical velocity (time accelerated by a factor 220.5), on top of the image of VBB velocity records, spectrogram of vertical velocity, coherogram of vertical and horizontal components and phase shift between these two components at maximum coherence. A cursor is moving along the records to indicate where the sound is produced.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

pptx file containing panels a and b. matlab .fig files containing the figure and the embedded data. 3 miniseed files containing VBB-VEL data after deglitching, despiking and removing the instrument response in the 0.01–10.00 Hz frequency range for the whole sol 986.

Source Data Fig. 2

Image file of crater positions on top of CTX background.

Source Data Fig. 3

Excel file with the raw data of panel a. matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data for panels b and c.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data. 3 miniseed files containing VBB-VEL data after deglitching, despiking and removing the instrument response in the 0.01–10.00 Hz frequency range for the whole sol 793.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data. 3 miniseed files containing VBB-VEL data after deglitching, despiking and removing the instrument response in the 0.01–10.00 Hz frequency range for the whole sol 981

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 3

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data. 3 miniseed files containing VBB-VEL data after deglitching, despiking and removing the instrument response in the 0.01–10.00 Hz frequency range for the whole sol 533.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 4

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 5

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 6

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 7

Tiff image file containing the figure.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 8

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 9

matlab .fig file containing the figure and the embedded data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 10

Tiff image file containing the figure.

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Garcia, R.F., Daubar, I.J., Beucler, É. et al. Newly formed craters on Mars located using seismic and acoustic wave data from InSight. Nat. Geosci. 15, 774–780 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01014-0

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