REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA— Scientists report the strongest earthquake that shook Mars This occurred not because of the fall of an asteroid, but because of tectonic forces within the planet itself. The new findings suggest Mars is more seismically active than previously thought.
Reported Space, Friday (20/10/2023), on May 4 2022, NASA’s now-defunct InSight lander recorded an earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale. This is five times stronger than the previous record holder of magnitude 4.2 measured by InSight in 2021.
Unlike most Marsquakes which stop within an hour, the echoes from the summer quake continued for six hours. The incident marked the strongest and longest earthquake ever recorded on another planet.
In addition to landing on Elysium Planitia on Mars in November 2018, InSight sensed more than 1,300 Marsquakes, at least eight of which were caused by asteroid impacts. The signal from a major earthquake in May 2022, measured by sensitive seismometers on board the lander, was similar to other signals caused by asteroid impacts, so scientists began looking for a new 30-meter-wide crater on Mars and a plume of dust, both of which will appear soon after asteroid impact.
Scientists also say teams in India, China, Europe and the United Arab Emirates searched for these indicators using their respective orbiters circling Mars, but they were never found. That’s why after months of searching, they concluded that the earthquake had tectonic origins.
Conventional wisdom holds that unlike Earth, Mars is too small and too cold to accommodate tectonic processes. Earth’s tectonic plates—large, irregularly shaped rocks whose boundaries are buried beneath the ocean—move in response to forces in the mantle (the layer between the Earth’s crust and core) and commonly cause landslides and earthquakes, so plate tectonics is not believed to occur on Mars.
Instead, according to the new study, the earthquakes detected by InSight were likely caused by the release of billion-year-old stresses within the Martian crust that formed and evolved as different parts of the planet cooled and shrank at different rates.
“We still don’t fully understand why some parts of the Earth appear to have higher pressure than others, but results like these help us to investigate further,” said Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in England, in a statement.
“One day, this information may help us understand where it is safe for humans to live on Mars, and where you might want to avoid it!” he said.
2023-10-20 13:43:28
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