A Meteor crashed into Mars, triggered a massive quake, NASA pics show

On Christmas Eve 2021, a meteor struck Mars, shaking the planet so intensely that NASA's InSight lander captured the tremblings.

Until NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite orbiting the red planet, took pictures of the fresh impact crater, scientists had no idea where the earthquake originated. On Thursday, NASA made the discovery public.

"It was immediately clear that this is the biggest new crater we've ever seen," Ingrid Daubar, InSight impact science lead, said in a press briefing. "It's about 500 feet wide or about two city blocks across. And even though meteorites are hitting the planet all the time, this crater is more than 10 times larger than the typical new craters we see forming on Mars."

A striking glow could be seen everywhere around the new crater: boulder-sized pieces of water ice that had been thrown up during the explosion from below the surface. NASA has never discovered water this close to the Martian equator. Scientists had only before observed water ice grouped close to the poles.

The finding is encouraging for NASA's goal of sending people to Mars in the future.

Their observations from those meteor hits, which were presented in two papers and published on Thursday in the journal Science, may help resolve a long-standing conundrum about the geography of Mars.