[ad_1]
- NASA’s InSight lander has finally detected earthquakes on Mars greater than magnitude 4.
- An earthquake lasted almost 90 minutes and was five times more energetic than the previous record holder.
- Large earthquakes help NASA scientists scan the core of Mars to learn how habitable planets evolve.
NASA’s Insight lander sat silently in the empty dust plains of Mars on Saturday, as it had done for the past 1,000 Martian days, when the ground began to rumble.
The shaking lasted almost an hour and a half.
The robot sent data from its seismometer back to Earth, and NASA scientists realized they had what they were waiting for: a large earthquake. Insight had recorded a magnitude 4.2 earthquake on Mars – the kind of earthquake NASA scientists had wanted to observe since Insight landed on the Red Planet in November 2018.
Two other big ones also took place recently: on August 25, the lander felt two earthquakes of magnitudes 4.2 and 4.1.
Before these, the biggest earthquake the lander felt was a 3.7 in 2019.
InSight’s lander seismometer, photographed by the lander’s camera on September 23, 2020.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
“It appears that there are fewer large earthquakes on Mars, compared to the number of small earthquakes, than we expected. It’s a bit confusing,” said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of InSight, at Insider in April.
But Saturday’s quake was five times stronger than the 3.7-magnitude rumble.
These great earthquakes provide a missing piece of the Martian puzzle. Scientists can use their seismic waves to learn more about the makeup of the core of Mars, in the same way that waves from an X-ray or CT scan are used in the body. Getting more detailed views of the interior of Mars can provide clues to the birth of the planet and how it has changed over time. This knowledge could be crucial in astronomers’ efforts to find other worlds that could harbor life.
“By looking at the core of Mars and the crust of Mars, and understanding that these haven’t changed much over the past 4.5 billion years, we can get a glimpse of what Earth might have been like look like very early on, ”Banerdt said. said in April. “Mars helps us understand how rocky planets form and how they generally evolve.”
Earthquakes on Mars revealed an Earth-like planet with a moon-like crust
InSight has detected more than 700 earthquakes in total, and they have already revealed a lot about the interior of the planet. Scientists have learned that the crust of Mars is thinner than they thought and looks more like the crust of the moon than that of the Earth – it is shattered by the impacts of asteroids.
Because the Martian crust is so dry and broken, its tremors last much longer than earthquakes. They reverberate between cracks in the crust and there isn’t as much moisture to absorb them. For example, earthquakes experienced by InSight typically last 10 to 40 minutes.
Recently, scientists have also used earthquakes to determine that Mars has a molten core. They don’t yet know if a solid inner core is hiding under a molten outer core, as is the case on Earth.
NASA Creatively Solved Energy Crisis To Keep InSight’s Seismometer On
The InSight lander’s camera captured one of its dust-covered solar panels on February 14, 2021.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
InSight almost shut down its seismometer earlier this year. The robot was suffering from a power shortage as dust accumulated on its solar panels.
Among NASA’s other Martian robots, heavy gusts of wind blew steadily enough to remove dust from the solar panels. But the plains where InSight is located have proven to be unusually calm.
Then, to make matters worse, Mars was entering the coldest part of its year during our spring and summer, when the red planet was moving furthest away from the sun in its oval-shaped orbit. This meant that InSight would need to funnel even more energy into its heaters to survive.
NASA therefore decided to put InSight into hibernation. In February, the lander began to gradually turn off its scientific instruments in order to save energy for warming up. In June, the team was preparing to shut down the seismometer, and Banerdt told a NASA group that the lander’s life might not last beyond April 2022, according to SpaceNews.
But then the InSight team devised an ingenious way to clean solar panels. They asked the robot to pick up the dirt and slowly run it past the panels. Some of the large grains of sand got caught in the wind, bounced off the solar panels, and took stubborn dust with them, enough to add about 30 watt hours to Insight’s daily power output after the first attempt.
They performed this process several times in order to ensure a sufficiently stable power supply for the seismometer to continue operating until June and July, when Mars began to turn towards the sun.
“If we hadn’t acted quickly earlier this year, we might have missed some great science,” Banerdt said in a press release.
[ad_2]
Source link