In the press: Dr Ben Fernando explores Mars meteorite smashes

Christ Church Access Fellow and Oxford InSight geophysicist Dr Ben Fernando, has appeared in multiple news outlets this week with analysis of two Mars meteorite impacts. 

Taking data from two Nasa missions, the InSight team discovered that Mars is home to more subsurface ice than previously thought. 

'The larger impact made a crater about 150 metres across — one and a half times the size of London’s Trafalgar Square — and a blast zone around 35km across, which would cover most of the area inside the M25,' Dr Fernando told the Financial Times.

'I think we were a little surprised to find ice that close to the equator,' he said. 

The team detected the event using the seismometer on the US space agency's InSight lander and then identified the impact sites with the use of Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite.

'InSight's observations in the transition zone between the North and the South have been really valuable because clearly the crust evolved in very different ways in those regions of the planet,' Fernando explained to BBC News.

'How and why they developed the way they did is still an open question, but I think these impact events have probably provided more understanding on this topic than anything else we've done so far on the mission.'

In addition to his research on numerical high-performance computing simulations of seismic waves, Dr Ben Fernando is also Christ Church’s Access Fellow, responsible for programmes helping state school students and students from Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic backgrounds discover whether Oxford might be for them.