“The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust,” said Liliya Posiolova, orbital science operations lead for the orbiter at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, in a statement.The images captured by the orbiter, along with seismic data recorded by InSight, make the impact one of the largest craters in our solar system ever observed as it was created.About a thousand quakes of this size occur on Earth each year, but Mars is less active than our planet, so it was “a pretty big one” for the red planet, she said.Increasing amounts of dust have settled on the lander’s solar panels, only exacerbated by a continent-size dust storm detected on Mars in September, and its power levels keep dropping.But the weather event has kicked a lot of dust up into the atmosphere, and it has cut down the amount of sunlight reaching InSight’s solar panels, said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California."