2023-04-26 18:46:51
It’s been 47 years since the first human spacecraft landed on Mars. It was Viking 1, and its historic landing took place on July 20, 1976. Since then, nearly fifty probes, landers, rovers, and orbital missions have visited the red planet. With the central idea of looking for signs of water and life, all these spacecraft and robotic vehicles have analyzed the orbit, the composition of the terrain, the atmosphere, the geology, the climatology and a number of other characteristics of Mars. And now, for the first time, a mission called InSight, in its off time, has managed to observe seismic waves traveling through the Martian core, revealing its exact size and composition. Which in turn will lead to finding out how this ‘sister planet’ of Earth could become a world so different from ours.
Led by scientists from the University of Bristol, an international team of researchers used seismic data acquired by InSight to directly measure the properties of the core of Mars, finding that it is made of an alloy of completely liquid iron, but with high percentages of much lighter materials, such as sulfur, oxygen or hydrogen.
InSight landed on Mars on November 26, 2018 in a volcanic region called Elysium Planitia, very close to the planet’s equator, and operated non-stop until December 2022. Unlike other landers, InSight never moved from its site. It was, in effect, a geophysical robot, and was equipped with a series of instruments specially designed to study the subsoil and the geological evolution of Mars. It is striking that its scientific mission was initially scheduled to last just over a Martian year (about two Earth years). But InSight managed to survive more than four years, much longer than expected, so it continued to collect data until the end of 2022. And among that data, the first invaluable signals of ‘marsquakes,’ or Martian earthquakes, seismic waves that were captured until the end of last year.
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