A meteorite recently slammed into Mars and left this giant black stain of a crater
(An illustration of Mars against the blackness of space.NASA/JPL-Caltech; Dave Mosher/Business Insider)
Like Earth, planet Mars is a shooting gallery for rogue space rocks that zip around at tens of thousands of miles per hour.
But the red planet has barely 1% of the atmosphere of Earth's to slow down, vaporize, and break up any of these stray lumps of stone and metal.
It also lacks the flowing surface water and robust weather of our home planet to quickly erase signs of the impact craters these strays leave behind.
As a result, Mars is littered with celestial pockmarks and, occasionally, researchers spot fresh impact craters using orbiting satellites like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its HiRISE camera.
Studying fresh impacts not only helps researchers peek at freshly exposed dirt on Mars, which may have once been habitable, but also helps assess how much risk Earth might face from small yet dangerous space rocks.
Below is a zoomed-out image of one asteroid strike that was photographed just a few months ago, and it shows the giant black stain the event left behind:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/meteorite-recently-slammed-mars-left-172700494.html
Oh my,,, What would have happened if that meteorite slammed into earth?