Earthquakes on Mars help understand the interior of the Red Planet

NASA’s “InSight” robotic probe has detected seismic waves caused by earthquakes, which has helped scientists understand the makeup of Mars, including preliminary estimates of the size of its massive core made of liquid metals , the thickness of its rind and the nature of its coat, according to “Reuters”.
These findings shed light on what was once a poorly understood internal structure of this planet, Earth’s smallest neighbor, and provided a few surprises, in addition to confirming that the center of the Red Planet is molten. The InSight probe, which landed in 2018 to begin the first Mars depths survey mission, has detected more than 700 earthquakes, most of them of modest intensity. The waves produced by these earthquakes vary in speed and shape as they pass through different materials within a planet. The data taken from the seismograph of the “Insight” probe, which includes some thirty earthquakes, made it possible to focus on the characteristics of the interior of the planet.
“The real significance of these results is that for the first time, we already have measurements of the dimensions or volumes of major components of Mars,” said Bruce Banerdt, planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and head of the mission. InSight. “Before that, all we had were comparisons with Earth, theoretical calculations, and indirect inferences from other observations such as the chemistry of isotopic traces of Martian meteorites,” Banerdt added. The core of Mars, the deepest geological layer, was about 2,275 miles (3,660 km) in diameter, which is larger than previously thought.
“Because there are no active tectonic plates on Mars, nothing similar happens there,” said Brigitte Knappmayr Andron, a seismologist at the University of Cologne in Germany who led one of the three studies of the interior of Mars published in the journal Science. It also means that the crust of Mars is very old. The mantle of Mars, sandwiched between the crust and the core, extends about 1,560 km below the surface. Its composition differs from that of Earth, indicating that the two planets emerged from a different material when they formed over 4.5 billion years ago. The diameter of Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, is approximately 4,220 miles (6,791 km), while the diameter of Earth is approximately 7,926 miles (12,755 km).