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For those of us with a sweet tooth, the holiday season is a perpetual bliss of sugary treats, so it’s in the spirit of these Christmas times that the folks at NASA just revealed a picture of the Red Planet’s internal makeup as something. similar to a three layer cake.
The data allowing examination of the bakery-like composition of Mars beneath its crust is courtesy of the space agency’s Insight Mars lander, which sent scientists the first geological dissection of another planet besides Earth.
The intrepid probe discovered that Mars consists of a three-layered crust made up of different types of rocks 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 red planet’s murky origins and evolution.
With the lander’s difficulty in deploying and using its “mole” digging probe on the Martian soil, Insight turned and fortunately was able to gather details about the rock layers using a domed seismometer provided by the French space agency, Center National d ‘Études Spatiales (CNES).
By capturing the nature of multiple seismic wave storms, the scientists at home were able to analyze the thickness of each slice of Mars and determine the time duration of the waves and the resistant path through these marsquakes.
First launched in May 2018, InSight, an acronym for the Inner Exploration mission using seismic investigations, geodesy, and heat transport, is a specialized robotic lander designed to investigate the mysteries of the composition of Mars.
The main objectives of your mission are to explore the deep interior of the neighboring planet. Landing in the Elysium Planitia region near the Martian equator on November 26, 2018, it continues to monitor and collect data that helps us understand the formation of the rocky planets of the inner solar system billions of years earlier.
Last year, InSight’s fixed position detected hundreds of small earthquakes, most of which did not exceed magnitude 3.7, and collected the most comprehensive meteorological data of any previous surface mission launched to Mars.
“After studying more than 480 marsquakes, we have enough data to start answering some of these big questions,” said NASA researcher and InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt.
Preliminary research and numerical calculation estimate that each of the planetary layers on Mars is between 12 and 23 miles thick, which is considerably thicker than Earth’s oceanic crust but thinner than our planet’s continental layer.
“Sometimes you get big flashes of amazing information, but most of the time you are unraveling what nature has to tell you,” Banerdt added. “It is more like trying to follow a trail of complicated clues than having the answers presented in a tightly wrapped package.”
