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For the first time, seismologists have imaged the interior of another planet.
Using data from the seismometer from NASA’s InSight spacecraft, the agency’s Martian rovers and orbiters around the Red Planet, the scientists published three articles in the journal Science with revealing facts about the interior deep in the planet.
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According to a statement released Thursday by NASA’s Southern California-based Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), a decade’s research has confirmed that the center of the planet is molten and detailed the depth and composition of its crust, its mantle and its core.
While, comparatively, Earth’s outer core is molten and its inner core is solid, researchers will continue to use information from the lander’s Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to understand whether Mars is similar.
To date, SEIS has recorded over 730 earthquakes and the papers have used data from 35 of these earthquakes, all with magnitudes between 3.0 and 4.0.
However, unlike Earth, Mars has a large tectonic plate, but faults and fractures still form in the planet’s crust due to pressures caused by the “planet’s shrinking as it continues to cool.” .
By knowing how seismic waves can vary both in speed and in appearance – or “stir” – as they pass through different materials on a planet, seismologists have received a method to study the internal structure of the planet.
Each Science article focuses on a different layer of the planet – the crust, mantle, and core structures had been separated in a process called “differentiation” – and part of InSight’s original mission was to study depth , the size and structure of the three Martians. layers.
The crust, which is up to 12 or 23 miles, has been found to be thinner than previously believed and could have two to three undercoats.
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The mantle extends 969 miles below the dusty surface.
The core of Mars is said to have a radius of 1,137 miles.
“This study is a once in a lifetime chance,” said Simon Stähler, ETH Zurich, lead author of the lead article. “It took scientists hundreds of years to measure the core of the Earth; after the Apollo missions, it took them 40 years to measure the core of the Moon. InSight only took two years to measure the core Of March.”
Using seismograms, InSight scientists reportedly spent a lot of time combing through the seismograms for those ripples and vibrations that can reveal the properties of stratification in the layers of the crust.
According to JPL, the InSight team was surprised to discover that all of the major earthquakes on the planet originated from Cerberus Fossae, a region of Mars that may have seen lava flows over the past millions of years.
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That said, no earthquakes have been detected in some of the most important volcanic regions on the planet, although it is possible that gray areas prevent the echo of an earthquake from an underground reflector of reach SEIS.
“We would always like to see the big one,” said Mark Panning of JPL, co-lead author of the article on the crust. “We have to do a lot of careful processing to extract the things we want from that data. Having a bigger event would make it all easier.
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