Giant Impacts on Ancient Mars (Artist's Concept)
This artist's concept depicts a scene from 4.5 billion years ago, when scientists believe giant impacts occurred on Mars, injecting debris deep into the planet's mantle. NASA's InSight lander detected this debris before the mission's end in 2022, and these findings from the mission were published in the journal Science on Aug. 28, 2025.
The early solar system had many space rocks bashing into the young planets, and smaller impactors can be seen surrounding this giant one in the image. The giant asteroids or comets that sent debris into the Martian mantle would have released enough energy to melt continent-size swaths of the early crust and mantle into vast magma oceans.
Figure A is an uncropped version of the artist's concept.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed InSight for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. InSight was part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supported spacecraft operations for the mission.
A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain's Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.
For more about InSight, visit: