NASA has officially announced the end of the spacecraft mission InSight which has been on Mars for four years.
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The spacecraft collected detailed information about the planet’s internal structure, its liquid core, and its magnetic field, in addition to recording hundreds of earthquakes.
This vehicle is the first robotic unit in the history of astronauts designed specifically to study the geology of another planet, its main instrument is a seismometer. SIX which records internal tectonic activity and meteor impacts.
At the boundaries of the inner layers of rocks of different densities, the velocity of seismic waves changes, and part is reflected and returned to the surface. Based on this data, an idea of the planet’s structure can be obtained.
On November 26, 2018, the rover touched down on the Elysian Plain, and in April 2019, it recorded its first earthquake. By May 2022, 1,313 seismic events had already been recorded. Most of them are surface shocks, the waves of which propagate only into the planet’s crust. But there were also deeper, lower-frequency geophysicists with which to locate the mantle and core.
It was previously believed that all internal tectonic activities on Mars stopped three billion years ago, and since then only isolated volcanoes have been active there. Now it turns out to be a geologically living planet, and the thermal and geochemical evolution of matter continues in the depths.
Mars is like an egg.
To clarify the state of matter inside Mars, an experiment called RISE (circulation and internal structure). Where the vehicle’s devices recorded the vibrations of the planet’s shells associated with the movement around the sun, just as you can determine them through the rotation of the egg, whether raw or boiled, as the more the speed changes under the influence of external forces, the more fluid the core.
And at the station, which remained in place, there were radio signaling facilities that made it possible to accurately measure orbital signals, and by calculating the planet’s moment of inertia, scientists concluded that Mars, like Earth, has a liquid core with a diameter of about 3,660 kilometers, consisting mainly of iron and nickel. . Compared to Earth, it has more light elements such as hydrogen and sulfur.
Mars magnetic pulse
Soviet satellites from the “Mars” group discovered a magnetic field around the planet about 500 times weaker than Earth’s, which is very unstable, and the local tension can vary by 1.5-2 times, and the magnetic poles do not match the physical poles.
This indicates that the iron core is inactive relative to the crust, that is, the planetary dynamo mechanism, as on Earth, does not work on Mars.
Insight is the first lander equipped with a magnetic sensor. It turns out that the magnetic field on the planet is stronger than he thought, and is constantly changing. Since September 2019, the devices have recorded strange magnetic pulses and intensity fluctuations several times.
Martian dust is the vehicle’s first enemy, as it is deposited on the solar panels, so that problems begin in April 2021, after a dust storm in which most of the vehicle’s features were disabled, to disconnect on December 18.