Five Mars 2020 craters put shallow-impact models to the test

A study first published September 13, 2026, examined five craters made by Mars 2020 landing hardware in 2021, during the mission that delivered Perseverance. Its preferred three-dimensional model estimates local target cohesion at 7 ± 1.5 kPa for the shallow impacts of dense tungsten ballast.

Orbital images identified five craters

Researchers compared images taken before and after the landing by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Context Camera (CTX) and HiRISE camera. The five measured crater diameters range from 2.6 ± 0.5 m to 6.3 ± 0.5 m.

Two craters, identified as “-c” and “-e,” are the most likely matches for the mission’s two tungsten cruise ballast mass devices (CBMDs), each weighing 77 kg. The study attributes three other craters to fragments of the cruise stage. The sites lie about 70 km northwest of Jezero crater’s rim, in a valley leading toward the Jezero delta. The two likely CBMD craters are associated with wind-formed bedforms and valley-fill deposits.

What the simulations say about local cohesion

POST2 trajectory simulations put the ballast devices’ impact angle at 10° relative to the horizontal and their predicted speed at 2.7–5.4 km/s. The study treated 4 km/s as the most likely speed. Its preferred three-dimensional simulation modeled a tungsten impact at 4 km/s and 10°, and estimated the local target’s cohesion at 7 ± 1.5 kPa.

The two-dimensional simulations yielded a different, configuration-specific cohesion range of 0.2–1 kPa. These are outputs from different model configurations: the 7 ± 1.5 kPa figure is the study’s preferred estimate from its three-dimensional shallow-impact model.

Why crater scaling struggled in this case

For the modeled impacts, conventional crater-scaling relations overestimated crater diameters by an order of magnitude. The finding concerns a specific combination: a dense tungsten projectile striking regolith at a shallow angle.

The study’s π-scaling calculation produced an effective-strength parameter of 50–200 kPa, depending on vertical impact speed. Effective strength is a separate quantity from the cohesion estimated by the shock-physics simulations.

The three-dimensional simulations assume a spherical projectile and omit local slopes. The study’s authors call for additional 3D simulations to refine estimates for these impacts.