The planet Mars is a glutton for punishment.
Scientists
have found no less than 20 new craters etched into the red planet's surface
from space rocks that pummeled Mars within the last seven years [image].
"If you
were to live on Mars for about 20 years, you would live close enough to one of
these events to hear it," said researchers Michael Malin, who led the study.
"So there'd be a big boom and you'd know there was an impact crater."
Malin,
chief scientist at San Diego, California's Malin Space Science Systems, and
his team used the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard NASA's now silent Mars
Global Surveyor (MGS) to photograph about 30 percent of the planet between
January and May this year. They compared the new images with photographs taken
by MGS during earlier surveys to find new impact sites.
In the same
study, researchers found
evidence that liquid water may have flowed out of martian
gullies within the last five to seven years [images].
"It was
just amazing that we could even do that," said Kenneth Edgett, a Malin Space
Science Systems researcher who spotted the first of the new craters, told SPACE.com.
"And it was really a whirlwind from that first one all the through the 20th."
Malin said
that it was by chance Edgett spotted an image with a new crater and recalled a
similar view taken years earlier by the MGS orbiter. Their subsequent survey
found the new craters, which range in diameter from seven feet (two meters) to
486 feet (148 meters), and an average impact rate of about 12 per year.
A few
months after Malin and his team performed their survey, the MGS probe went
silent and is thought to
be lost after 10 years of spaceflight.
The
research is detailed in the most recent issue of the journal Science,
and it validated crater impact models of Mars that until now were based solely
on theory, Malin said.
The new
craters also suggest a potential hazard for future astronaut explorers on
long-duration missions to the red planet, he added.
"There is a
hazard, it's probably a low hazard," Malin said. "But it's one we need to think
about in terms of these objects hitting Mars at a fairly substantial rate."
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