A Marsquake detected in May this year by NASA’s InSight lander was at least five times the size of the next largest seismic event recorded on the planet.
The quake occurred on May 4 and measured 4.7 on the Richter scale – five times more powerful than the earthquake InSight lander the previous largest earthquake Mars back in August 2021, which was recorded at a magnitude of about 4.2. Another indication of the magnitude of the event is that InSight continued to detect waves from the record-breaking earthquake for about 10 hours, while the aftereffects of all previous Martian quakes had subsided within an hour.
“The energy released from this single marsquake is equivalent to the cumulative energy of all other marsquakes we’ve seen so far,” said John Clinton, a seismologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and a co-author of the study. , in a pronunciation of the American Geophysical Union, which published the research. “Although the event was more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away, the waves recorded at InSight were so large that they nearly saturated our seismometer.”
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InSight launched in May 2018 and landed on Mars in late November of that year. It has since used its seismometer to detect activity on the Red Planet, which is seismically much quieter than Earth. Recording Marsquakes yields new information about Mars, with the motions of waves through the planet revealing new insights into the planet crust, mantle and core .
“For the first time, we were able to identify surface waves, which move along the crust and upper mantle and have traveled around the planet multiple times,” Clinton said.
The May seismic event was also unusual in that its epicenter was not near any known nodes of activity. It also showed characteristics of both types of marsquakes that have been observed so far: high-frequency waves with fast but shorter vibrations and low-frequency waves with larger amplitude.
The marsquake took place on Sol 1222 of the InSight mission (a sol is one day on Mars and lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth). NASA has said that InSight alone has weeks to live before it stops functioning due to a buildup of dust on its energy-generating solar panels. However, the lander has already far outlived its primary mission life of two Earth years.
The research is described in a paper published Wednesday (Dec. 14) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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