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Who is JD Vance? Things to know about Donald Trump's pick for vice-president
Former U.S. president Donald Trump on Monday chose Sen. JD Vance of Ohio to be his running mate as he looks to return to the White House.
The NASA InSight Lander has "heard" and detected the vibrations of four space rocks as they slammed into Mars over the past two years.
It's the first time a mission has picked up both seismic and acoustic waves from an impact on Mars, and InSight's first detection of impacts since landing on the red planet in 2018.
Fortunately, InSight wasn't in the path of these meteoroids, the name for space rocks before they hit the ground. The impacts ranged from 85 to 290 kilometres away from the stationary lander's position in Mars' Elysium Planitia, a smooth plain that's just north of its equator.
A meteoroid hit the Martian atmosphere on September 5, 2021, and then exploded into at least three shards, each one leaving behind a crater on the red planet's surface.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter then flew over the site to confirm where the meteoroid landed, spotting three darkened areas. The orbiter's color imager, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, took detailed close-ups of the craters.
Researchers shared their findings about the new craters in a study that published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful," said study coauthor Ingrid Daubar, assistant professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in a statement.
Data from InSight also revealed three other similar impacts, one on May 27, 2020, and two additional ones in 2021 on February 18 and August 31.
The agency released a recording of a Martian meteoroid impact Monday. During the clip, listen for a very science fiction-sounding "bloop" three times as the space rock enters the atmosphere, explodes into pieces and hits the surface.
Scientists have actually questioned why more impacts haven't been detected on Mars because the planet is located next to our solar system's main asteroid belt, where many space rocks emerge to hit the Martian surface. The Martian atmosphere only has 1% of the thickness of Earth's atmosphere, meaning that more meteoroids zip through it without disintegrating.
During its time on Mars, InSight has used its seismometer to detect more than 1,300 marsquakes, which take place when the Martian subsurface cracks due to pressure and heat. The sensitive instrument can detect seismic waves that occur thousands of miles away from InSight's location -- but the September 2021 event is the first time scientists used the waves to confirm an impact.
It's possible the noise of the Martian wind or seasonal changes that occur in the atmosphere hid the additional impacts . Now that researchers understand what an impact's seismic signature looks like, they expect to find more when they comb through InSight's data from the last four years.
Seismic waves are helping researchers unlock additional information about the interior of Mars because they change as they move through different material.
The meteoroid impacts create quakes with a magnitude of 2.0 or less. So far, InSight's largest detected quake was a magnitude 5 event in May.
Impact craters help scientists understand the age of a planet's surface. Researchers can also determine how many of the craters formed early on in the tumultuous history of the solar system.
"Impacts are the clocks of the solar system," said lead author Raphael Garcia, academic researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, France, in a statement. "We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces."
Studying InSight's data can provide researchers with a way to analyze the trajectory and size of the shock wave produced when the meteoroid enters the atmosphere as well as once it hits the ground.
"We're learning more about the impact process itself," Garcia said. "We can match different sizes of craters to specific seismic and acoustic waves now."
InSight's mission is coming to an end as dust builds up on its solar panels and reduces its power. Eventually, the spacecraft will shut down, but the team is unsure of when that will happen.
The most recent readings have suggested it could shut down between this coming October and January 2023.
Until then, the spacecraft still has a chance to add to its research portfolio and stunning collection of discoveries on Mars.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump on Monday chose Sen. JD Vance of Ohio to be his running mate as he looks to return to the White House.
Canada's ambassador to the United States says Sen. JD Vance, the recently announced pick for former U.S. president and Republican nominee Donald Trump's running mate, 'knows Canada well.'
The truck driver who caused the deadly Humboldt Broncos bus crash has applied to have his permanent resident status returned.
A serial sex offender known as the "balaclava rapist" for attacking 23 women in Edmonton more than 40 years ago has been granted full parole while he continues to serve three concurrent life sentences.
U.S. President Joe Biden told NBC News in an interview Monday that it was a 'mistake' to say he wanted to put a 'bull's-eye' on Republican nominee Donald Trump, but argued that the rhetoric from his opponent was more incendiary while warning that Trump remained a threat to democratic institutions.
Pro Football Hall of Famer Terrell Davis said Monday he was 'humiliated' after being handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines flight, then later apologized to by law enforcement, over the weekend.
Sask. TikTok star "Be Brave" Bella Thomson has died. She was 10-years-old.
Rising sea levels are making each day slightly longer, and there's no sign it's going to stop, a new study funded in part by NASA and the Canadian government has found.
A Manitoba man who armed himself and rammed the gates of Rideau Hall with a truck in 2020 to confront Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been granted statutory release.
An event July 22 at Dynamic Earth in Sudbury will mark the 60th anniversary of the iconic Big Nickel, the largest coin in the world.
Cyclist Jagjeet Singh cruised through Montreal on Sunday morning as he rides across the country to raise money for a children's charity.
A rare ammonite fossil – about 75 million years old - has been discovered in eastern Saskatchewan.
Seven-year-old goalie Hudson Hardill is an unlikely Calgary Flames fan, being that he lives in Peterborough, Ont., and his dad Chris is a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.
A WestJet employee's chance encounter on a recent flight spiced up her life in a big way.
A Kelowna, B.C., man says he's always liked gnomes because they have a 'bit of mystery' to them. And he recently got a taste of that whimsy when his garden gnomes disappeared, and came back to him in a peculiar fashion.
After more than 50 years, Toronto's iconic 'Leslieville dollhouse' will soon have a new owner.
One man is bringing a blast from the past to a Winnipeg community.
Some say a photograph is simply a memory frozen in time – and a high school graduation photo taken in Churchill, Man. takes that adage to a completely new level.