An December 24, 2021 at 6:49 p.m. local mean solar time, a meteorite struck the Amazon Planitia on Mars from the south-west. The five to twelve meter chunk released enormous energy, it corresponded to the explosive force of two and a half to ten kilotons of TNT explosive. Two powerful shock waves were created, one already in the atmosphere, the other from the impact itself. It finally left a crater around 150 meters wide and 21 meters deep. Ice that existed underground was thrown to the surface, and material was spread over the surface of Mars up to nine kilometers away. Mars had not seen such a large impact in many years. The tremors of the planet could still be felt 3460 kilometers away as a magnitude 4 tremor – where NASA’s Insight lander touched down four years earlier. The lander and its instruments were not affected by the shaking – on the contrary: it generated valuable measurement data. And they were a real Christmas present for the scientists involved in the mission – one that the researchers could hardly have given themselves.
Because there were times when you really felt sorry for the Insight scientists – there had been so many problems and setbacks. On November 26, 2018, the landing probe touched down on the red planet with the SEIS seismometer, the HP3 heat flux probe and the RISE radio experiment in order to comprehensively explore the inner structure of our neighboring planet for the first time. Bruce Banerdt, the scientific director of the Insight mission, described the area below a depth of five meters down to the center of Mars as a kind of black hole – and expressed his determination to finally close this knowledge deficit. But Mars was initially uncooperative.