The great earthquake shakes the planet Mars, lasts 4 hours and the vibrations are felt for up to 10 hours

FLORIDA – NASA’s InSight Mars Lander has detected an earthquake in Mars planet (earthquakes) of magnitude 4.7 lasting more than four hours. Earthquake sending seismic waves to the surface entirely around the circumference of the planet and this is the first time this has happened on Mars.

Labeled S1222a, Marsquake on May 4, 2022 occurred in an unexpected region of Mars outside the tectonically active Cerberus Fossae region. These seismic waves reveal layers of sedimentary and volcanic rock in the Red Planet’s crust that could indicate past collisions with large objects, such as meteoroids or comets.

“Even though the event occurred more than 1,931 kilometers away, the waves recorded on InSight were so large that they nearly saturated our seismometers,” said John Clinton, a seismologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. ./2022).

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InSight is a stationary platform on Mars that NASA launched in May 2018 and landed in the Elysium Planitia region. InSight is equipped with seismometers to study the crust, mantle and core of Mars.

So far, the region of the planet Cerberus Fossae northeast of the rover has been found to be the most tectonically active. However, the most recent quake, designated S1222a, occurred 37 degrees southeast of InSight.

“Seismometers aboard the InSight lander have recorded thousands of Martian earthquakes, but never of this magnitude. This quake generated many types of waves, including two types of waves trapped near the surface,” said Caroline Beghein, a professor in UCLA’s department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences.

The waves from the earthquake lasted about 10 hours, ten times longer than previously recorded. Only one of two types of waves has been observed before on Mars, usually those caused by meteor impacts rather than large earthquakes.

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This important discovery will likely be one of Insight’s last. A dust storm gradually covered the platform’s solar arrays, reducing their power to a critical level. It is estimated that it will not last long after the end of 2022.

“We were struck that it was near the end of the extended mission that we experienced this truly extraordinary event,” said Taichi Kawamura, planetary scientist at the Institut de physique du globe de Paris, France.

(wib)