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. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA26518