NASA Marsquake Data Reveals Lumpy Nature of Red Planet’s Interior
The rocky material which had an impact on the lies of Mars dispersed in giant pieces throughout the mantle of the planet, offering clues on the interior of Mars and its old past.
This seems to be fragments of the follow -up of the massive impacts on Mars which occurred 4.5 billion years ago were detected deeply below the surface of the planet. The discovery was made thanks to the now retired NASA implementation, which recorded the conclusions before the end of the mission in 2022. The old impacts released enough energy to melt the continents’ size of the crust and the early mantle in large magma oceans, simultaneously injecting the fragments of impacts and the Martian debris the planet.
There is no way to say exactly what struck Mars: the early solar system was filled with a range of different rocky objects that could have done so, including some so large that they were indeed protoplanets. The remains of these impacts still exist in the form of pieces as large as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) and dispersed in the Martian coat. They offer a record kept solely on worlds like Mars, whose lack of tectonic plates has prevented its interior from ensuring that the earth results in a process known as convection.
The result was reported on Thursday, August 28 in a study published by the journal Science.
“We have never seen the interior of a planet in detail and clarity before,” said the main author of the newspaper, Constantinos Charalambous of the Imperial College London. “What we see is a coat dotted with ancient fragments. Their survival to date tells us that the Mars coat has slowly evolved over billions of years. On earth, characteristics like these may have been largely erased.”
Insight, which was managed by the NASA Laboratory Propulsion Jet in southern California, placed the first seismometer on the surface of March in 2018. The extremely sensitive instrument recorded March 1,319 before the end of the landing mission in 2022.
Earthquakes produce seismic waves that change when they cross different types of equipment, offering scientists a means of studying the interior of a planetary body. To date, the Insight team has measured the size, depth and composition of the crust, the mantle and the Mars nucleus. This last discovery concerning the composition of the mantle suggests how much you have to be discovered in insight data.
“We knew that Mars was a time capsule with records of his early training, but we do not plan how clearly we could see with Insight,” said Tom Pike of Imperial College London, co-author of the newspaper.
Mars does not have the tectonic plates that produce temblors that many people in seismically active areas know. But there are two other types of earthquakes on earth which also occur on Mars: those caused by rocks crunching under heat and pressure, and those caused by meteoroid impacts.
Among the two types, the weather impacts on Mars produce high frequency seismic waves that travel deeply in the planet’s mantle, according to an article published earlier this year in geophysical research letters. Located under the crust of the planet, the Martian coat can have up to 960 miles (1,550 kilometers) and is made of solid rock which can reach temperatures up to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius).
The new scientific document identifies eight keel for Mars whose seismic waves contained a strong and high frequency energy which deeply reached the coat, where their seismic waves were clearly modified.
“When we saw this for the first time in our data on the earthquake, we thought that slowdowns were taking place in the Martian crust,” said Pike. “But we then noticed that the more the seismic waves move in the mantle, the more these high frequency signals were delayed.”
Using computer simulations on the planet’s scale, the team saw that slowdown and blurring only occurred when the signals passed through small regions located in the coat. They also determined that these regions seem to be pieces of equipment with a different composition from that of the surrounding coat.
With a resolved enigma, the team focused on another: how these lumps got there.
By thinking about the clock, they concluded that the lumps have probably arrived in the form of giant asteroids or other rocky materials which struck Mars at the beginning of the solar system, generating these magma oceans while they were rolling deep into the coat, bringing with them fragments of crust and coat.
Charalambous compares the pattern with a broken glass – a few big bursts with many smaller fragments. The motif is consistent with a great release of energy which has dispersed many fragments of material throughout the coat. It also corresponds well to the current reflection that in the early solar system, asteroids and other planetary bodies regularly bombed young planets.
On the ground, the crust and the upper coat is continuously recycled by the tectonics of the plates pushing the edge of a plate on the warm interior, where, by convection, a warmer and less dense material rises and wells of cooler and denser material. Mars, on the other hand, has no tectonic plates, and its interior circulates much more slowly. The fact that such fine structures are still visible today, “said Charalambous:” tells us that Mars has not undergone the vigorous barattage that would have smoothed these lumps. “
And in this way, Mars could indicate what can be hidden below the surface of other rocky planets that lack plates tectonics, including Venus and Mercury.
JPL has managed information for the Directorate of the NASA Scientific Mission. Insight was part of the NASA discovery program, managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center of the agency in Huntsville, in Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the Insight spacecraft, including its cruise scene and its Lander, and supported space vessel operations for the mission.
A number of European partners, including the National Center of France, Space Studies (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), have argued the Insight mission. CNES provided the seismic experience for the Internal Structure Instrument (SEIS) to NASA, with the main researcher of the IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Important contributions for SEIS come from IPGP; The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; The Federal Institute of Swiss Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the package of heat flow and physical properties (HP3) Instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. The centro of Astrobiología (CAB) of Spain provided the temperature and wind sensors.
Andrew good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433
Andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA seat, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2025-110
