An Exploding Asteroid Blasted Across Mars' Surface in the Last 10 Years

[Judi Lynn]

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | February 27, 2019 04:00pm ET

Sometime in the last decade, something heavy slammed into the Martian atmosphere and shattered into a hard rain of superheated material. Those pieces fell to the Red Planet's surface, dotting the Martian dirt with a pattern of pockmarks.

The impact craters, astronomer Phil Plait wrote on his Bad Astronomy blog, suggest that the asteroid hit Mars while in an already weakened state. Most solid rock or metal asteroids are strong enough to survive the journey through the planet's atmosphere to the world's surface. But many asteroids, he explained, have already suffered collisions during eons spent tumbling through the solar system. Those collisions can leave the space rocks weakened and covered in fissures, which split open under the intense heat and pressure of atmospheric entry.

"It's essentially an explosion, the force of the sudden and furious release of energy when it splits," Plait wrote. [5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions]

You know this happened recently on Mars because images of the same region from 2009 don't show the craters, as explained in a statement from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/64878-mars-pockmarked-by-exploding-asteroid.html?utm_source=notification

[DeltaLitProf]

1. Richard Hoagland will go on his podcast . . .

. . . and announce it as a crashed alien ship. So obvious.

[SkyDaddy7]

2. LOL!!

I was just thinking the same thing while reading the article "What type of Mars Woo-Woo will be spun out of this?" ...And how will they connect it to NASA finally losing contact with the rover "Opportunity" after +15yrs? You know they will!