HiRISE Views Impact Crater Matching InSight's Seismic Data
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera to capture this impact crater in Cerberus Fossae, a seismically active region of the Red Planet, on March 4, 2021. Scientists matched the crater's appearance on the surface with a quake detected by NASA's InSight lander, which was about 1,000 miles (1,640 kilometers) away. The crater is estimated to be about 71 feet (21.5 meters) in diameter.
Most of the impacts detected by InSight, which was retired in 2022 after operating for more than four years, were thought to send their seismic signals through the Martian crust. But scientists concluded the energy from this impact traveled through the planet's mantle, much deeper than expected, after studying the location of the impact crater and seismic signals linked to it. Because of this finding, models of the composition and structure of the inner planet will have to be reassessed.
This impact crater, along with others covered in a pair of papers published in Geophysical Research Letters in February 2025, was found with help from a machine learning algorithm developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The algorithm searched through tens of thousands of images captured by MRO's Context Camera in a matter of days, detecting 123 potential craters that may have occurred at the same time InSight was recording data. Traditional methods, in which human scientists carefully peer over images pixel by pixel, would have taken years of work to find these matches.
Human scientists still had to narrow down the pool of candidate craters to 49 that matched InSight's quake data. After discovering this impact, scientists commanding MRO to take more detailed imagery with HiRISE.
The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
JPL managed InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight was part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supported spacecraft operations for the mission.
A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain's Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.
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