To explore the interior of Mars using seismic investigations, geodesy and thermal transport, NASA launched the InSight spacecraft in May 2018, and it landed safely on Mars in November of the same year.
The two-year mission aimed to study the deep interior of Mars, to learn how celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, such as the Earth and the Moon, were formed, and recently recorded a record-breaking earthquake on Mars.
One of InSight’s main instruments for this mission is the Structured Interior Seismic Experiment (SEIS). This rotating, dome-shaped instrument captures the “pulsing” or seismic vibrations of Mars, and using data from SEIS, scientists have made a new discovery about swamps on the Red Planet’s surface.
Scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) suggest that volcanic activity beneath the surface of Mars could be responsible for causing frequent earthquake-like earthquakes in a particular region of the Red Planet.
New research published in Nature Communications shows that scientists from the ANU and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have discovered 47 previously undiscovered swamps under the Martian crust in an area called Cerberus Fossae – a seismically active region on Mars that is less than 20 million years old.
The results indicate that magma in Mars’ mantle is still active and responsible for volcanic earthquakes, contrary to scientists’ previous beliefs that these events are caused by Mars’ tectonic forces.
According to geophysicist and co-author Professor Hrvoje Tkalczyk, of the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences, the frequent nature of these earthquakes and the fact that they have all been detected in the same region of the planet suggests that Mars is more seismically active than scientists previously thought.
Professor Tkalcic said: “We found that these earthquakes occurred repeatedly at all times of the Martian day, whereas earthquakes detected by NASA, and reported in the past, only appeared to have occurred during the middle of the night when the planet is calmer.”
“Therefore, we can assume that the movement of molten rock in the mantle of Mars is the trigger for these 47 newly discovered swamps under the Cerberus Fossae region.”
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