'USEFUL' ICE PRESENCE
The valuable information gathered in studying the crash will contribute to deeper knowledge of Mars' interior and the history of how the planet was created, scientists said.
The presence of ice, in particular, is "surprising," said Daubar, who also co-authored the two studies.
"This is the warmest spot on Mars, the closest to the equator, we've ever seen water ice," she said.
In addition to the information this discovery offers about the Martian climate, the presence of water at this latitude -- and not just near the poles -- could prove "really useful" for future human visitors to Mars, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze said.
"We'd want to land the astronauts as near to the equator as possible," she said, to take advantage of warmer temperatures.
"That ice could be converted into water, oxygen or hydrogen," Glaze said.
The impact was powerful enough to generate seismic waves both down to the planet's core and across its crust horizontally, making it possible to study Mars' internal structure -- revealing that the crust on which InSight sits is less dense than the crust the waves traveled over from the crater site.
The end of InSight's mission -- which recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes in total -- could come in the next couple of months, according to Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, due to the expected accumulation of dust on the lander's solar power panel.
It's "sad," he said, while celebrating that the probe worked "marvelously" for four years.
