Using new instruments and clever science, the Mars Insight lander left us with incredible new insight into the belly of the red planet.
The life of the Mars InSight lander came to an end last year as its solar panels were covered with dust and its power supply slowly dwindled away. After four years of research and data collection, NASA officially declared the end of the mission in December 2022.
Shaken by quakes The Earth has tectonic plates that shift and move over millions of years, causing earthquakes when they rub together. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics today, but it is shaken by similar quakes called marsquakes. That means the right instrument can study those quakes and the way they bounce around the planet’s interior to learn more about its structure.
How to measure a marsquake Seismometers are a fairly basic piece of equipment, and given how much experience we have using them on Earth, adjusting them for Mars is conceptually simple. The designers needed to adjust for the different level of gravity, and the instrument needed to be extremely sensitive to pick up small shakes. But that was the easy part.
Understanding seismic waves To understand how InSight works, you need to understand seismic waves. There are two types of seismic waves, called P and S. As waves pass through the planet, they can move in different ways: With P waves, the material moves backward and forward in the same direction that the wave is moving. With S waves, the material moves side to side compared to the direction of the wave.
Working out the location of the source is a bit more complicated. The process uses a property called the polarization of the seismic waves, which refers to the direction of motion within the wave. “So if a P wave is coming in from the east, for example, its particle motions are going to be moving in the east-west direction. They’re not going to be going north-south,” Panning explained.
So InSight took data from marsquakes to measure the depth of the layers. As each layer has different material properties, each one interacts with seismic waves in different waves. And this is what allows researchers to work out the thickness and properties of each layer.
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