InSight into Mars mysteries

• Autores: Leah Crane
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3271, 2020, pág. 11
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Deep under its surface, Mars is quaking. The team behind NASA's InSight lander, which reached the Martian surface in November 2018, has released the data from its first 10 months on the planet. Here, Crane presents some of the mission's most fascinating discoveries so far. InSight's main goal is to measure marsquakes, which can be caused by underground seismic activity or objects hitting the planet's surface. So far, it has detected 24 relatively major quakes of magnitudes between 3 and 4. The rest of the 174 quakes discovered during InSight's first 10 months were relatively small, making it harder to figure out exactly where they occurred and what caused them. The way in which seismic waves propagate through the ground depends on its structure and how hydrated it is, so the quakes are telling us about the distribution of water on Mars. The top layers of crust seem to contain minerals with water in them.