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A new technique reveals single atom misfits and could help design better semiconductors used in modern and future electronics.

A new technique reveals single atom misfits and could help design better semiconductors used in modern and future electronics.

A team has discovered that the new organic molecule thienyl diketone exhibits high-efficiency phosphorescence, achieving a rate over ten times faster than traditional materials. This breakthrough provides new guidelines for developing rare metal-free organic phosphorescent materials, promising advancements in applications like organic EL displays, lighting, and cancer diagnostics.

Painting roofs white or covering them with a reflective coating would be more effective at cooling cities like London than vegetation-covered 'green roofs,' street-level vegetation or solar panels, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

A start-up in Albania, co-founded by a mining industry mogul, backed by a mining industry billionaire, is farming plants to harvest carbon-neutral nickel from the soil while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

I usually don’t put adverts on this site, and of course I’m not getting any dosh for this, but I thought it was a good deal, and it’s effective only today.  23andMe, the DNA-testing ancestry service I used myself, is having a sale on its “ancestry service” today, which will tell you where your genes come from and, if you want, put your data in a bank that allows you to find your registered relatives.

The usual price is $119, but today only it’s $79: a 33% reducation. I don’t think you’re going to find it much cheaper than that. You can, of course, pay more if you want to learn your chances of getting breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, or many other diseases, but I’m too much of a worrier to do that.

Click on the screenshot below (or here) if you want to find out about your ancestry.  You can get up to three kits at that price.

New Zealand, which is still moving towards integrating science and woo, has combined them again in a new summer fellowship offered by the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland (below) The supervisors are Professor Cate Macinnis-Ng, an ecologist, and Sarah Rewi, a research fellow.

I’m not sure whether these fellowships are funded by the Kiwi government, though I’m guessing they are because the U of A is a state school. This means that the project below is likely funded by NZ taxpayers. Importantly, it combines science with woo, in the form of Mātauranga Māori (MM), the indigenous “way of knowing” that includes some empirical trial-and-error knowledge, tradition, religion, story-telling, ethics, sociology, and sundry forms of spirituality. Co-supervisor Dr. Rewi has studied how MM “informs” the study of sooty shearwaters and grey-faced petrels.  In that study, the contribution of MM apparently included advice from elders on where and when to kill the chicks for food, and, usefully, how to rotate chick harvest among areas. Because MM includes some real empirical knowledge, it’s not all bunk, but there’s no need to meld MM and science when you can simply incorporate the genuine empirical knowledge of MM (which is scant compared to the amount of woo) into science.

See the ad here (scroll down at the link) or click below:

Here’s a description of the position as noted above; bolding is mine:

With interests in mātauranga-based science research on the rise, it is important these forms of research are responsive to Māori community needs. Understanding the impact of land-use, particularly agricultural activity, on groundwater resources is of key concern to Māori. This project will involve field-based work and data analysis researching into spatial patterns of groundwater chemical composition and microbial communities. It will examine how scientific indicators can assist mana whenua in their assessment of the state of the water’s mauri. No specific skills are required but it is recommended that the candidate has an interest in the interface between mātauranga and science. It is a requirement that the student has whakapapa Māori.

Note that no specific skills are required but you have to be willing to meld MM and science (bolding is mine). And you apparently have to be Māori, so in that sense it’s a racially biased ad. As reader Peter said, who found the ad, “Imagine if a student had to prove they had English ancestry to get a grant to study Roman Britain.”

What do the Māori words mean in the ad? Remember, even most Māori don’t speak the language fluently, and many don’t speak it at all, while European descendants of “colonists” have the language forced upon them without translation, probably because of sacralization of all things Māori. At any rate, here are translations:

Mana whenua, as defined in the Māori dictionary, means this:

(noun) territorial rights, power from the land, authority over land or territory, jurisdiction over land or territory – power associated with possession and occupation of tribal land. The tribe’s history and legends are based in the lands they have occupied over generations and the land provides the sustenance for the people and to provide hospitality for guests.

Apparently the ad means that the research is aimed at helping local people lean some stuff about groundwater, like what spirits it embodies. But things really go into the weeds when we look at the definition of mauri:

Mauri (noun) life principle, life force, vital essence, special nature, a material symbol of a life principle, source of emotions – the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity. Also used for a physical object, individual, ecosystem or social group in which this essence is located.

As Nick Matzke, an American scientist working in New Zealand, noted here, here and here, mauri is simple vitalism, the view that all objects are imbued with some undefined “life force”.  In a letter to the New Zealand Herald, Nick correctly noted that mauri, which is worming itself into the NZ science curriculum, is simple pseudoscience:

Unfortunately, the concept of ‘life force’ is a well-known pseudoscience, known as vitalism. Vitalism was experimentally debunked by chemists in the 1800s. Having a government agency force it back into the chemistry curriculum by political fiat — while steamrolling the vehement and informed objections of science teachers — is a huge problem. Vitalism is a pseudoscientific error on the same level as asserting that the Earth is flat, or that the world is only 6,000 years old. If vitalism is right, then all of chemistry and biochemistry is wrong.

And so is biology! (See my post on the incursion of mauri into chemistry and electrical engineering.)

To say that the funding will help the locals assess “the state of the water’s mauri“, then, is to say nothing; it’s like saying the project will help assess the state of the water’s Christianity. There is no mauri that we know of, so this is a funded search for nothing.

Finally, what is the single qualification to get the money and do this “science”? The student must have “whakapapa Māori”, which apparently means Māori ancestry. Here’s the definition of the first word (Māori, of course, are the indigenous people, descended from voyaging Polynesians):

Whakapapa. (noun) genealogy, genealogical table, lineage, descent – reciting whakapapa was, and is, an important skill and reflected the importance of genealogies in Māori society in terms of leadership, land and fishing rights, kinship and status. It is central to all Māori institutions. There are different terms for the types of whakapapa and the different ways of reciting them including: tāhū (recite a direct line of ancestry through only the senior line); whakamoe (recite a genealogy including males and their spouses); taotahi (recite genealogy in a single line of descent); hikohiko (recite genealogy in a selective way by not following a single line of descent); ure tārewa (male line of descent through the first-born male in each generation).

In other words, unless I’m mistaken, the only requirement for this fellowship is that the student has Māori ancestry. This, of course, is ethnicity-based hiring, eliminating all requirements for the position save one’s ancestry, which must be indigenous.  This would be illegal in America, but it’s both legal and encouraged in New Zealand.

I’ve given up hope for the future of science in New Zealand, a country with a proud scientific past. In a misguided effort to incorporate indigenous “ways of knowing” into science, of which this ad is one example, the NZ government is busy ruining science education in the country. I had hoped that the newish Luxon government would do better then the damaged wrought by the Ardern administration, but the opprobrium towards criticizing anything indigenous seems permanently engrained.

So-called “cool roofs” would bring down the average air temperature in cities like London during a heatwave more than green roofs, trees or solar panels do

A 20-year analysis of almost 400,000 generally healthy adults shows that vitamins do not help you live longer.

The post No Benefit to Daily Multivitamin Use first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A snorkelling tourist in East Timor has filmed a pygmy blue whale calf drinking its mother’s milk for the first time

A simple experiment and mathematical model suggest that when you snack on pistachios, you may need a surprisingly large bowl to accommodate the discarded shells

A quantum phenomenon that muddles the rules of cause and effect could make quantum computers better at performing certain operations

A grass-green snake from Vietnam with yellow eyes, blue lips and a brick-red tail has been identified as a distinct species

Giving AI systems the ability to focus on particular brain regions can make them much better at reconstructing images of what a monkey is looking at from brain recordings

Mercury puts on one of its best apparitions for 2024 this month.

Where have all of the planets gone? The late evening fall of dusk in early July also sees a sky seemingly vacant of familiar naked eye planets. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are now denizens of dawn, and will stay that way for most of the remainder of 2024.

But two challenging planets are now emerging low to the west at dusk: Mercury and Venus. The two interior worlds are now mounting a slow return, as the hunt is now on the recover the two after sunset.

Mercury’s July apparition in particular is an interesting one, and one of the best of six for observers worldwide. This is mainly because the planet is headed towards aphelion 0.4667 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun on July 27th, just five days after greatest elongation. At greatest elongation on July 22nd , Mercury will display an 8” diameter 45% illuminated disk, shining at a respectable magnitude +0.3.

To be sure, Mercury doesn’t look like much more than a dot in a telescope, even at high power… but part of the thrill of finding the illusive world lies in knowing what your actually seeing.

Mercury, Venus and the Moon on July 8th. Credit: Stellarium. Exploring Mercury

To be sure, Mercury has been known of since antiquity and isn’t at all that hard to see, if you know exactly where and when to look for it. A low flat horizon looking west at dusk certainly helps.

The often told tale that Nicolas Copernicus never saw Mercury is probably apocryphal. Looking at the diminutive world through the telescope reveals a cycle of Moon-like phases… and not much else. Mercury’s distinction as the innermost world in the solar system always assures that it always lingers low down in the murk of the atmosphere at dusk or dawn. This makes it too blurry to glimpse much in terms of surface detail. It wasn’t until the advent of space exploration that we knew much more about Mercury. NASA’s Mariner 10 made two brief flybys past the planet in 1974 and 1975, revealing an airless, cratered world 1.4 times the size of our Moon. Since then NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER revealed the planet in greater detail, becoming the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the world in 2011. Meanwhile, the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has thus far made three flybys past Mercury, and will enter orbit in late 2025.

One of the most amazing views of Mercury in recent memory came from the Big Bear Solar Observatory during the May 9th, 2016 transit of Mercury:

…And Venus Makes Two

Meanwhile, Venus is also joining the evening scene. Though brighter at magnitude -3.9, (almost 100 times brighter than Mercury) Venus is also lower to the horizon in July. Venus typically makes a slower comeback into the evening. This is because it’s approaching us from the farside of the Sun. Think of Venus as a runner, trying to catch the Earth on the inside track of the solar system. Venus spends the remainder of 2024 in the evening sky. The planet reaches greatest eastern elongation 47 degrees from the Sun on January 10th, 2025.

The sky scene becomes ever more dynamic as the month continues. On July 6th, Mercury actually transits (passes in from of) the Beehive Cluster (Messier 44). Use binoculars to catch +4th magnitude dwarf planet 4 Vesta nearby. Venus also meets Messier 44 on July 18th, though the event is much lower to the horizon.

Mercury crosses M44 on July 6th. Credit: Stellarium.

Mercury reaches greatest elongation 27 degrees east of the Sun at dusk on July 22nd.

The Moon joins the scene on the evenings of July 7th and July 8th as a waxing crescent. The crescent Moon always adds a three-dimensional look to the scene. This is because the nighttime side is dimly illuminated by the Earth in what’s termed Earthshine.

Mercury, Venus and the Moon on July 7th.

If you’ve never seen Mercury for yourself, this month is a good time to try and check the innermost world off of your life list.

The post Meeting Mercury at Dusk in July appeared first on Universe Today.

Drosophila -- known as fruit flies -- are a valuable model for human heart pathophysiology, including cardiac aging and cardiomyopathy. However, a choke point in evaluating fruit fly hearts is the need for human intervention to measure the heart at moments of its largest expansion or its greatest contraction to calculate cardiac dynamics. Researchers now show a way to significantly cut the time needed for that analysis while utilizing more of the heart region, using deep learning and high-speed video microscopy.

A new study offers new insights into the evolution of foldable proteins.

After 100,000 orbits and almost 23 years on Mars, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has seen a lot. The spacecraft was sent to map ice and study its geology, but along the way, it’s captured more than 1.4 million images of the planet.

A recent image captured the Solar System’s tallest mountain and volcano, Olympus Mons.

This image won’t win any photography contests, but that’s not what this is about. Scientists are experts at extracting information and images like this hold information that’s part of the overall Mars puzzle.

In this image, Odyssey is taking a horizontal look at Mars. The spacecraft usually points down at the surface and captures images in long strips, which is why the image has such an unusual shape. But this horizontal viewpoint is part of an effort to use Odyssey and its Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera to capture high-altitude images of Mars’ horizon.

“Normally, we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon, we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” said Odyssey’s project scientist, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”

Dust storms typically begin during Martian fall, and the blue layer on the bottom is dust in Mars’ atmosphere. Above that is a purplish layer. It’s where red dust from the planet’s surface is mixed with bluish water ice. The top blue-green layer is where water ice clouds reach 50 km (31 miles) into the sky. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Odyssey captured its first horizontal horizon image in late 2023, and it took engineers three months to get the operation right. THEMIS is fixed in position and points straight down. For these images, the entire spacecraft had to tilt 90 degrees. But it also had to maintain a position where the Sun could strike its solar panels. To accomplish that, Mars Odyssey used its thrusters to orient itself so that its antennae pointed away from Earth. As a result, the spacecraft couldn’t communicate with Earth for the duration of the maneuver.

Orbiters like Odyssey, MRO, and Mars Express have imaged the Martian surface in great detail and given us a vast archive of images. But these images are different. They give scientists a different look at the Martian sky, its clouds, and its dust.

THEMIS is an infrared camera and is designed to sense temperature changes on Mars’ surface. It can differentiate between sand, rock, ice, and dust. By pointing at the sky, THEMIS can measure the presence of ice and dust in Mars’ atmosphere.

This is Odyssey’s first of the Martian atmosphere from a horizontal perspective. It was taken from about 250 miles above the Martian surface – about the same altitude at which the International Space Station orbits Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Odyssey personnel first realized they could point the spacecraft at the horizon when other missions were landing on the Martian surface. When Curiosity landed in 2012, Odyssey played a key role by relaying information about the landing back to Earth. To do that, it had to orient itself differently, pointing its antenna at the rover’s landing ellipse. While positioning the antenna for that job, scientists realized that THEMIS was pointing at the horizon.

“We just decided to turn the camera on and see how it looked,” said Odyssey’s mission operations spacecraft engineer, Steve Sanders of Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin built Odyssey and helps conduct day-to-day operations alongside the mission leads at JPL. “Based on those experiments, we designed a sequence that keeps THEMIS’ field-of-view centered on the horizon as we go around the planet.”

Odyssey has been a definite success by any measure, and it’s still going strong. In fact, it’s the longest continually active mission around another planet. But that feat takes careful planning and operation.

“Physics does a lot of the hard work for us,” Sanders said. “But it’s the subtleties we have to manage again and again.” The spacecraft is solar-powered, and it’s out of direct sunlight for several minutes in each orbit, but the instruments have to be kept in a certain range to remain operational, which means juggling energy demands.

Odyssey also has a limited amount of hydrazine fuel for its thrusters. With no fuel gauge, engineers have to recalculate the amount remaining after each maneuver. One way they do this is by applying heat to the two propellant tanks to see how long they take to heat up. In March 2023, NASA said that the spacecraft has enough fuel to last at least until the end of 2025.

An artist’s impression of the Odyssey orbiter around Mars. Image Credit: NASA

“It takes careful monitoring to keep a mission going this long while maintaining a historical timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices,” said Odyssey’s project manager, Joseph Hunt of JPL. “We’re looking forward to collecting more great science in the years ahead.”

Odyssey can change its orbit, so there’s no way to calculate exactly how many orbits it has left. But it’s completed over 100,000 in almost 23 years, and it’s likely to complete several hundred more before its hydrazine runs out.

The post A New View of Olympus Mons appeared first on Universe Today.

There have been many proposals for building structures on the Moon out of lunar regolith. But here’s an idea sure to resonate with creators, mechanical tinkerers, model builders and the kid inside us all.

What about using actual LEGO bricks?

Researchers ground up a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite and used the dust to 3D print LEGO-style space bricks. They actually click together like the plastic variety, with so far only one downside: they only come in one color, grey.

Want to see some of these lunar LEGOs? LEGO will showcase the space bricks at some of its stores.

Creating building materials on the Moon or Mars from the material on hand means construction materials don’t have to be transported from Earth. This would be a huge savings in launch costs because less weight would have to be boosted from Earth.

A group of scientists from ESA (European Space Agency) were inspired by LEGO bricks, and with the advances in 3D printing, had the idea to print space bricks and test how they would work for construction.

The only problem was that except for the Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts – which are highly guarded for scientific study only — there’s not any lunar regolith available on Earth to experiment with.

But meteorite dust is a close cousin to lunar regolith. The ESA team was able to get a meteorite that was discovered in Northwest Africa in 2000 and is about 4.5 billion years old. It is made of metal grains and chondrules, similar to Moon dust.

Inspired by LEGO, ESA scientists have used dust from a meteorite to 3D-print LEGO-style ‘space bricks’ to test out construction ideas for a future Moon base. Credit: The LEGO Group

They mixed the meteorite dust with a some other things, like a polymer called polylactide and regolith simulant and 3D printed bricks that mimic and behave just like LEGO bricks. While they aren’t smooth like regular LEGO bricks, ESA said the space bricks gave ESA’s space engineers the flexibility to build and test a variety of structures using this new material.

“It’s no secret that real-world scientists and engineers sometimes try out ideas with LEGO bricks,” said Emmet Fletcher, Head of ESA’s Branding and Partnerships Office. “ESA’s space bricks are a great way to inspire young people and show them how play and the power of the imagination have an important role in space science, too.”

“Nobody has built a structure on the Moon, so it was great to have the flexibility to try out all kinds of designs and building techniques with our space bricks,” said . ESA Science Officer Aidan Cowley. “It was both fun and useful in scientifically understanding the boundaries of these techniques.”

Below is a list of where the lunar LEGOs will be on display, and the LEGO website has additional details. Hopefully the lunar LEGOs will inspire both children and adults about space and to encourage them to build their own LEGO Moon bases.

USA

The LEGO Store, Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota
The LEGO Store, Disney Springs, Florida
The LEGO Store, Water Tower Place, Chicago
The LEGO Store, Disneyland Resort, California
The LEGO Store, 5th Avenue, New York

Canada

The LEGO Store, West Edmonton

UK

The LEGO Store, Leicester Square, London

Germany

The LEGO Store, München Zentrum
The LEGO Store, Cologne

Denmark

The LEGO Store, Copenhagen
LEGO House, Billund

Spain

The LEGO Store, Barcelona

France

The LEGO Store, Paris

Netherlands

The LEGO Store, Amsterdam

Australia

The LEGO Store, Sydney

The post LEGO Bricks Printed out of Space Dust appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA’s InSight Mars Lander faced some challenges during its time on the red planet’s surface. Its mole instrument struggled to penetrate the compacted Martian soil, and the mission eventually ended when its solar panels were covered in dust. But some of its instruments performed well, including SEIS, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure.

SEIS gathered Mars seismic data for more than four years, and researchers working with all of that data have determined a new meteorite impact rate for Mars.

SEIS was designed to probe Mars’ interior structure by measuring seismic waves from Marsquakes and impacts. It measured over 1300 seismic events. There’s no way to absolutely measure how many of them were from impacts, but scientists working with the data have narrowed it down.

NASA’s InSight lander placed its seismometer onto Mars on Dec. 19, 2018. SEIS was later covered with a protective shell to shield it from wind. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Their results are in new research published in Nature Astronomy titled “An estimate of the impact rate on Mars from statistics of very-high-frequency marsquakes.” The lead authors are Géraldine Zenhäusern and Natalia Wójcicka, from the Institute of Geophysics, ETH Zurich, and the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College, London, respectively.

“This is the first paper of its kind to determine how often meteorites impact the surface of Mars from seismological data.”

Domenico Giardini, Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH Zurich and co-Principal Investigator for the NASA Mars InSight Mission.

Though SEIS was an effective instrument, it couldn’t always tell what each seismic event was. Only a handful of the events it detected were powerful enough to determine their location. However, six events in close proximity to the InSight lander were confirmed as meteorite impacts because they were correlated with acoustic atmospheric signals that meteors make when they enter Mars’ atmosphere. The six events belong to a larger group called very high-frequency (VF) events.

While the source process for a typical marsquake measuring magnitude 3 takes several seconds, an impact-generated quake takes much less time because of the collision’s hypervelocity. These are the VF events.

During about three years of recording time, InSight and SEIS detected 70 VF events. 59 of them had good distance estimates, and according to the researchers, a handful of them were “higher quality B VF events,” meaning their signal-to-noise ratios are strong. “Although a non-impact origin cannot be definitively excluded for each VF event, we show that the VF class as a whole is plausibly caused by meteorite impacts,” the authors explain in their paper.

This figure from the research shows envelopes of recorded VF quality B events sorted by distance, plotted from 120?seconds before to 1,100?seconds after the event. They’re aligned by their first signal (Pg) arrival. The blue lines are the second signal arrival (Sg.) The six red events are the confirmed impact events, and for those, the black lines show where the “chirp” signal arrives. The chirp signal is a signature of impact events. Image Credit: Zenhäusern, Wójcicka et al. 2024.

This led to a new estimate of Mars’s impact frequencies. The researchers say that between 280 and 360 meteoroids about the size of basketballs strike Mars each year and excavate craters greater than 8 meters (26 ft) in diameter. That’s almost one every day at the upper end. “This rate was about five times higher than the number estimated from orbital imagery alone. Aligned with orbital imagery, our findings demonstrate that seismology is an excellent tool for measuring impact rates,” Zenhäusern said in a press release.

Impact rates on different bodies in the Solar System are one way of understanding the age of their surfaces. Earth’s surface is young because the planet is so geologically active. Earth is also much easier to study in greater detail, for obvious reasons. But for bodies like the Moon and Mars, impact rates can tell us the ages of various surfaces, leading to a more thorough understanding of their history.

Orbital images and models based on preserved lunar craters have been the main tools used by planetary scientists to infer impact rates. The data from the Moon was used to extrapolate Mars’ impact rate. But there are problems with that method. Mars has more powerful gravity and is closer to the source of most meteors, the asteroid belt.

That means more meteoroids strike Mars than the Moon, and that had to be calculated somehow. Conversely, Mars has widespread dust storms that can obscure craters in orbital images, while the lunar surface is largely static. Mars also has different types of surface regions. In some regions, craters stand out; in others, they don’t. Trying to accurately account for that many differences when extrapolating impact rates from the Moon to Mars is challenging.

This work shows that seismometers can be a more reliable way to understand impact rates.

“We estimated crater diameters from the magnitude of all the VF-marsquakes and their distances, then used it to calculate how many craters formed around the InSight lander over the course of a year. We then extrapolated this data to estimate the number of impacts that happen annually on the whole surface of Mars,” Wójcicka explained.

This figure from the research shows crater size and seismic moment for the six confirmed impacts near the InSight lander. Circles show single craters, and triangles show the effective diameter of crater clusters. The vertical error bars reflect the uncertainty in seismic moment magnitude derived using standard error propagation techniques. The horizontal error bars are given by the resolution of HiRISE images used to determine the crater sizes. Image Credit: Zenhäusern, Wójcicka et al. 2024.

“While new craters can best be seen on flat and dusty terrain where they really stand out, this type of terrain covers less than half of the surface of Mars. The sensitive InSight seismometer, however, could hear every single impact within the landers’ range,” said Zenhäusern.

These results extend beyond Mars. Understanding Mars also helps us understand the wider Solar System. “The current meteoroid impact rate on Mars is vital for determining accurate absolute ages of surfaces throughout the Solar System,” the authors write in their paper. Without accurate surface ages, we don’t have an accurate understanding of the Solar System’s history.

Now we know that an 8-metre (26-feet) crater is excavated somewhere on Mars’ surface almost daily, and a 30-metre (98-feet) crater is a monthly occurrence. But it’s about more than just crater size. These hypervelocity impacts create blast zones that dwarf the crater itself. The blast zones can easily be 100 times larger than the crater. So, a better understanding of impact rates can make robotic missions and future human missions safer.

“The higher overall number of impacts and the higher relative number of small ones found in our study show that meteoritic impacts might be a substantial hazard for future explorations of Mars and other planets without a thick atmosphere,” the authors write in their conclusion.

This study is a win for InSight and SEIS and for the researchers who pieced this together.

“This is the first paper of its kind to determine how often meteorites impact the surface of Mars from seismological data – which was a level one mission goal of the Mars InSight Mission,” says Domenico Giardini, Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH Zurich and co-Principal Investigator for the NASA Mars InSight Mission. “Such data factors into the planning for future missions to Mars.”

The post Basketball-Sized Meteorites Strike the Surface of Mars Every Day appeared first on Universe Today.