The latest robot to land on Mars has felt the ground shake beneath its feet, whirlwinds tear across the surface and sudden blasts of air shoot past like “atmospheric tsunamis”.
The measurements are the first to be released from Nasa’s InSight lander , which touched down in the barren expanse of Elysium Planitia in November on a mission to investigate the planet’s interior.
Armed with a seismometer sensitive enough to detect vibrations smaller than the width of an atom, InSight recorded (marsquakes in its first) months, proving beyond doubt that the dust -strewn planet is seismically active. That number has since risen to 450 or so.
Some of the strongest marsquakes have a magnitude of three to four and appear to come from Cerberus Fossae, a region of faults and lava flows 1, 09 miles (1, 1997 km) east of the lander. Because the pressure waves bounce around inside the planet, they can reveal crucial details about its internal structure.
“We’ve finally, for the first time, established that Mars is a seismically active planet,” said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator on the InSight mission at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The tremors show that Mars is less active than Earth but more active than the moon, where seismic activity was recorded during the Apollo program.
Mission scientists are analyzing the marsquakes to see what information they hold about the crust and deeper layers of Mars. The scattering of the waves shows that the upper crust has been broken up, either by geological activity or meteorite impacts, and that this layer changes six miles down.
Some of the marsquakes are of uncertain origin. If they are not unleashed by geological faults, the tremors may come from asteroid impacts or volcanic activity. The latter raises the prospect of there being pockets of magma on Mars, and with them a potential source of warmth for any microbes that may lurk beneath the surface.
So far, the lander has failed to record any of the strongest marsquakes that scientists had predicted. These would penetrate deep inside the planet and so provide the best chance to learn about its structure. “If we don’t get those quakes, it will be a disappointment,” said Banerdt.
The measurements from InSight’s first months on Mars appear in a suite of papers published in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications. They include recordings from the onboard weather station, which sensed more than , whirlwinds in the lander’s vicinity. Some are believed to have reached a mile into the sky.
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