Seismic waves from earthquakes detected by NASA’s InSight robotic probe helped scientists decipher the anatomy of Mars, including first estimates of the planet’s large liquid metal core, the thickness of its crust, and the nature of its mantle.
The findings unveiled on Thursday illuminate what was once a poor understanding of the internal structure of Earth’s smaller neighbor, and provide some surprises as well as confirmation that the center of the Red Planet is melted.
The InSight spacecraft, which landed on the planet in 2018 to begin the first mission to study the deep interior of Mars, has already detected more than 700 tremors, most of them moderate.
Waves generated by tremors vary in speed and size as they pass through different materials within a planet. Seismograph data on more than 30 Mars tremors allowed the planet’s interior to come into focus.
“The real importance of these discoveries is that, for the first time, we actually have measurements of dimensions – sizes – of the fundamental blocks of the planet Mars,” said planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, principal investigator for the mission. of InSight.
“Before that, all we had were comparisons to Earth, theoretical calculations and indirect inferences from other observations like chemical isotope traces of Martian meteorites,” added Banerdt.
The core of Mars, the geological layer at the center of the planet, is 3,660 kilometers in diameter, a measure larger than previously thought. This suggests that the core, composed mostly of iron and nickel, is less dense than previously known, with lighter elements such as sulfur, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen representing an unexpectedly large proportion of the composition. (source: agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br)
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