For those of us who have sweets, the holiday season is a perpetual bliss of sugary delights, so it is in the spirit of these times of juliet that the people of NASA have just unveiled an image of the inner composition. of the red planet as something resembling a three-layer cake.
The data to examine Mars’ bakery makeup under its crust is courtesy of the space agency’s Insight Mars landing, which sent scientists the first geological dissection of another planet apart from Earth.
The intrepid probe discovered that Mars consists of a three-layer crust formed by different types of rock stacked on top of each other like a cosmic birthday cake. These revelations will help astronomers, planetary geologists, and aerospace engineers better understand the history of the murky origins and evolution of the red planet.
With the lander’s difficulty in deploying and using his excavator “mole” probe on Martian soil, Insight pivoted and was fortunately able to collect details of the rock layers using a vaulted seismometer provided by the French space agency. , National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
By capturing the nature of multiple seismic wave storms, scientists back home were able to analyze the thickness of each slice of Mars and determine the length of time and the resilient path of the waves through these marsquakes.
InSight, first launched in May 2018, is an acronym for indoor exploration that uses seismic research, geodesy and heat transport, is a specialized robotic lander designed to investigate the mysteries of Mars ’makeup.
Your main goals are to explore the deep interior of the neighboring planet. Landing in the Elysium Planitia region near the Martian equator on November 26, 2018, he continues to monitor and collect data that helps us understand the formation of the rocky planets in the inner solar system billions of years ago.
Last year, InSight’s fixed position detected hundreds of small earthquakes, most of which did not exceed magnitude 3.7, and compiled the most complete meteorological data from any previous surface mission to Mars.
“After studying more than 480 earthquakes, we have enough data to start answering some of these big questions,” said Bruce Banerdt, a NASA researcher and senior researcher at InSight.
Preliminary research and the reduction in numbers estimate that each of the planetary layers of Mars is 12 to 23 miles thick, which is considerably thicker than Earth’s oceanic crust, but thinner than the continental layer of our planet. .
“Sometimes you get great flashes of amazing information, but most of the time it explains what nature has to tell you,” Banerdt added. “It’s more like trying to follow a trail of complicated clues than presenting us with the answers in a very well-wrapped package.”