Professor of Mathematics

Paata Ivanisvili

pivanisv@uci.edu · x.com/PI010101

Department of Mathematics, University of California, Irvine

Paata Ivanisvili

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Possible new impact sites on Mars

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed much of Mars with its Context Camera (CTX) several times since 2006, and when a small meteorite hits dusty ground it blows the bright dust away and leaves a dark spot that CTX can see, even when the crater itself is only a few metres wide.

This search compared old and new CTX images of the same ground automatically, pixel by pixel, and kept only dark spots that appeared between two dates and are missing from the published catalogue of 1,203 dated new craters (Daubar et al. 2022) and from the camera teams’ own target lists. All but three also lie outside every footprint of the high-resolution HiRISE camera, which photographed candidates 4, 17 and 33 by chance. Thousands of image pairs were screened and almost everything flagged was a look-alike (shadows of old craters under a different sun, dark streaks on slopes and dunes, haze, or alignment errors); the candidates below survived every check.

Candidates 15 to 37 then went through a second, deliberately sceptical review. It downloaded every image again, tested whether each earlier image would have shown the spot, and also searched two more catalogues of new impacts (Podobnaya 2026; Wagstaff et al. 2022). None of the 23 turned out to be already known. Their positions, dates and confidences are the review’s, and each of their pages shows its check.

Caveat. These are unconfirmed candidates, not discoveries. Each one passed every test that could be applied to the existing images, but only a new, sharper image (ideally from HiRISE) can show whether a fresh crater sits at the centre of the spot. The orbiter’s camera teams screen new images routinely and may already know about some of these. “Not in the record” means not in the public archives as of their latest releases: CTX images through May 2026 and HiRISE images through August 2026. One further catalogue, of new impacts near the InSight lander (Bickel et al. 2025), could not be downloaded; of candidates 4 to 37, numbers 5, 6, 7, 10, 22, 25 and 35 lie in its area. Numbers 25 and 35 formed after the period it covers; for the others it can only be inferred that it does not list them.

CTX images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. HiRISE images (last panel of the sanity check for the first candidate, the views of candidates 4, 17 and 33, and the HiRISE panels of the independent checks of 17 and 33): NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona. New-crater catalogues: Daubar et al. (2022), JGR Planets; Podobnaya (2026); Wagstaff et al. (2022). All figures were made from the raw public data in NASA’s Planetary Data System; the independent checks also use Arizona State University’s map-projected CTX images.

Candidates

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