The leading idea was that a meteorite had struck the surface of Mars-something that InSight had detected twice before, albeit on smaller scales. The quake didn’t appear to be coming from a nearby region of suspected volcanic activity called Cerberus Fossae, which had been pinpointed by InSight as the source for most of its recorded seismic events-and scientists could find no other surface feature suitable for sparking a spasm of this size. “When we first saw it, we were very uncertain,” says Mark Panning of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), project scientist on InSight. This monster marsquake was as large as all the others that InSight detected combined-so strong, in fact, that scientists struggled to explain its origin. The instrument was wildly successful: it detected more than 1,300 temblors before InSight ran out of power in December 2022.Īlmost as a swan song, the lander had recorded its biggest catch earlier that year-a 4.7-magnitude whopper dubbed S1222a, which was detected on May 4, 2022. NASA’s hope was to pick up marsquakes, whether they were caused by crustal cooling, space-rock strikes or even volcanic activity. Of its handful of instruments, particularly notable was the seismometer it placed delicately on the ground. NASA’s stationary InSight lander launched to Mars in May 2018, touching down six months later in November in a plain called Elysium Planitia just north of the Martian equator. Researchers have now ruled out a meteorite impact as the cause of this huge event, boosting the case that-seismically speaking-reports of the Red Planet’s death have been greatly exaggerated. This “marsquake” was far mightier than any other extraterrestrial tremor ever detected. Last year a NASA mission sent to listen to such seismic rumbles heard its loudest one. There is still warmth deep within, leftover from the world’s formation eons ago, and as that heat slowly escapes to space, the planet’s crust cools, contracts and quivers. But just below its frozen exterior, the planet itself is alive with the sound of thunder. Bone-dry, bitterly cold and bathed in cosmic radiation, the surface of Mars may well be dead, with not so much as a single microbe breaking its state of barrenness.
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