Hundreds of basketball-sized space rocks slam into Mars annually, creating impact craters and causing tremors across the planet, according to recent research.
Data from NASA's now-retired InSight mission could help plan future robotic and astronaut missions to Mars.
The InSight lander, which ended its mission in December 2022 due to dust accumulation on its solar panels, collected valuable data using the first seismometer on Mars.
This instrument detected over 1,300 marsquakes and captured evidence of meteoroids crashing into the planet.
Meteoroids, which range in size from dust grains to small asteroids, often survive Mars' thin atmosphere to impact the surface.
A significant meteoroid hit Mars on September 5, 2021, leaving multiple craters, and researchers have since discovered that such impacts are more frequent than previously thought.
A study published in Science Advances reveals that Mars is bombarded by space rocks two to ten times more frequently than earlier estimates suggested.
The research identified eight new craters from InSight's data, including two large ones the size of football fields.
Moreover, a companion paper in Nature Communications found that between 280 and 360 basketball-sized meteoroids hit Mars each year, forming craters larger than 26 feet.
Larger craters, about 98 feet wide, occur monthly.
This impact rate, five times higher than estimated from orbital imagery alone, shows that seismology is a powerful tool for measuring impacts.
