Mars is pelted by thousands of meteors every year; some of these are large enough to leave craters. With a thin atmosphere and close proximity to the Asteroid Belt, the scars of these large impacts remain on the surface for billions of years. Scientists can predict from the energy of the impact the size of the crater that will result. A simple seismic model of the surface of Mars can also predict how much vertical shaking will occur far from the impact. This program lets you adjust the properties of the impactor and its distance from a seismic station to calculate the vertical shaking.
This web page is adapted from Space Math @ NASA ILabs.
Resources:
Computing Projectile Size from Crater Diameter
(University of Arizona)
Moment magnitude scale (Wikipedia)
Background image from Viking
Iapygia region of Mars
Large impact crater, Huygens 450 km diameter