InSight began its mission back in 2018, and since then, it succeeded in gathering a lot of information on Mars, examining the planet’s interior and seeking for Marsquakes. At its landing on the Red Planet, it experienced ground tremble, cyclones shred across the field, and unexpected bursts of air shoot past like “atmosphere tsunamis.”
NASA is going to release the measurements in the following weeks. Equipped with a seismometer sensitive enough to identify fluctuations tinier than the expanse of an atom, InSight registered 174 marsquakes in 10 months. It proved its efficiency, and it showed how Mars is seismically active. From those first measurements, the lander has currently detected up to 450 Marsquakes.
Hundreds of Marsquakes Detected by NASA’s InSight Mars Lander
The marsquakes have a magnitude of up to four and seem to originate from Cerberus Fossae, a place of errors and lava streams 1,000 miles east of the lander. Due to the pressure fluctuations bounce near the planet’s interior, they can unveil vital data about its inner structure.
“We’ve finally, for the first time, established that Mars is a seismically active planet,” stated the leading investigator of the InSight mission, Bruce Banerdt. The tremblings display that the Red Planet is less active than our planet but more active than the Moon, where the seismic movement was registered during the Apollo project.
Mission researchers are examining the so-called Marsquakes to find out what data they got about the coat and deeper shells of Mars. The scattering of the flows showcases that the top layer has been shattered, either by meteorite impacts or geological movement and that this layer modifies six miles down.
The Origin of those Marsquakes Is Not Yet Known
As for the Marsquakes’ origin, things are unknown. If geological errors don’t discharge the tremblings, they might come from some volcanic activity or other space object impacts. The volcanic reason, however, increases the possibility of there being hollows of magma on the Red Planet.
Moreover, with them could be a possible source of heat for any microbes that might sneak underneath the ground. The InSight’s recordings include records from the onboard weather station, which identified more than 10,000 cyclones in the lander’s proximity.
