Two Seismic Events from InSight Confirmed as New Impacts on Mars

Abstract

We report confirmed impact sources for two seismic events on Mars detected by the NASA InSight mission. These events have been positively associated with fresh impact craters identified from orbital images, which match predicted locations and sizes to within a factor of 3, and have formation time constraints consistent with the seismic event dates. They are both of the very high frequency family of seismic events and are present with chirps (dispersed infrasound/acoustic waves). This brings the total number of confirmed Martian impact-related seismic events to eight thus far. All seismic events with chirp signals have now been confirmed as having been caused by impact cratering events. This includes all seismic activity within 100 km of the lander and two out of the four events with source locations between 100 and 300 km distance.