Mars lander deep under the Earth spots deep layers, gives the key to the formation of the planet Science

Two years ago, NASA’s Insight spacecraft, a short distance from the surface of Mars, aimed to collect the key to the Earth’s interior from the shaking of the Earth’s crust and the deep heat from its Earth. Mars, it turned out, had other ideas. Its sticky clay has failed Insight’s heat detection, and its sensitive seismometers have been deafened by gusts of wind in recent months. Most mysteriously, the planet has not been thundered by large marsupials that can vividly illuminate its depths.

Despite these obstacles, the small-but-clear-seismic precious clutch has enabled the Insight team to see signs of rocks, ten and hundreds of kilometers below the boundary. They are a sign of the formation of the planet millions of years ago, when it was a hot ball of magma and heavy elements like iron sank to form the core, while lighter rocks came out of the mantle to form the crust of the crust.

The results of the online meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) by some people earlier this month show that the planet’s crust is surprisingly thin, its mantle is colder than expected, and much of its iron is still molten. The findings suggest that in its infancy, Mars effectively provided heat – perhaps through the mantle rock and abdominal adaptive crust, similar to plate tectonics on Earth. “This may be evidence for the formation of more dynamic crusts in the early days of Mars,” says Stephen Mojjis, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is not involved with the mission.

The evidence has been hardly won. At the start of the mission, the wind was calm enough for Insight’s system ters meters, placed in a small dome placed on the surface, to hear a small earthquake crowd – a total of about 500. But since June, the wind shakes the surface, but all but a handful of new earthquakes. Disappointingly though, the wind was not strong enough to dust off the craft that darkened the craft solar panels and ended the mission in the next few years. The seismometers are still running non-stop, but a power outage has forced the team to shut down the weather station while using the lander’s robotic arm. “We’re starting to feel the effects,” says Bruce Bennard, Insight’s chief investigator and geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Meanwhile, about the length of the tube of the paper towel, the heat probe is stuck to the ground which compacts the rod instead of crumbling when trying to get inside. Mission engineers have used robotic hands to bring the probe down and cut the dirt on top. In the next two or three months, they will try to investigate once more, Benardt says. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll call it a day and accept the disappointment.”

Probably the biggest disappointment is the magn. There is a lack of a larger Mars eclipse than the intensity of Large seismic seismic waves travel more deeply, reflecting the main and mantle boundaries and even rotating the planet over its surface. Multiple echoes of large earthquakes can enable only one seismic station, such as Insight, to locate the source of an earthquake. But above the magnitude of the magn, Mars is curiously silent – a clear violation of the scaling laws that apply to the Earth and the Moon, where the magnitude of 100 corresponds to 3 events of magnitude 4 to an earthquake, and so on. “It’s a little weird,” says Simon Stahler, a seismologist at ETH Zurich’s team. It could simply be that the fault of Mars is not large enough to sustain a large strike, or that its crust is not brittle.

But two moderate earthquakes of magnitude of mode.7 and 3.itude, are a treasure for this mission. Finding the Cerberis fossa, deep fissures in the crust 1600 km east of the landing site that are suspected to be active from the earthquake, the quake sent one or two punches of compressive pressure (P) waves, then sidewinding shear (S) waves, lander. Some waves were limited to the crust; Others are reflected from the top of the cover. Se phases of the travel periods of the P and S waves indicate the thickness of the crust and indicate the different layers within it, Brigitte Napmeier-Andrનn, a seismologist at the University of Cologne, said in a presentation to the AGU. The top layer could reflect the physical location of the Earth during the period of intense planetary bombings in the first billion years, says Steven Hawk, a planetary scientist at Western Reserve University in the case.

At 20 or 37 kilometers thick, depending on whether the reflection is accurately traced to the top of the mantle, the Martian crust seems surprisingly thinner than the crust of the Earth’s continents. Researchers thought that Mars, a planet with a low internal heat, would have formed a ga planet crust, which was limited by the limited conduction of heat from the volcano and emitted by terrorists. (Even though Mars died from a volcano today, a huge volcano dot on its surface.) However, the thinner crust could mean that Mars was effectively losing heat, perhaps an obscure form of plate tectonics, rather than rebuilding its initial crust. By, says Mozzis.

A handful of earthquakes a few thousand kilometers away gave more clues. Those waves travel deep from the mantle and make contact with the mantle transition zone, a layer where mineral olivine is converted to wadslight by pressure. By analyzing the travel time of the waves passing through the top, bottom, and transition zones, the team found its depth – and found it to be less than expected, a sign of a cold mantle. Ph.D. Quancheng Huang said that this long tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny . University of Maryland, College Park students who presented some of the results at the AGU meeting. “Plate tectonics is a very effective way to cool a planet.”

The third science experiment on Insight Probe is still using a small Doppler shift in a radio broadcast sent to receivers from Earth to detect a slight dip in the Earth’s spin. The size and consistency of the planet’s iron core affects the bubbles as the raw eggs spin differently than the cooked ones. “We had something like 350 hours of trekking,” says Veronica Dehant, a geophysicist at the Royal Observatory in Belgium. Preliminary results confirm that the main fluid, measuring small variations in the planet’s gravity by the spacecraft, is consistent with a radius consistent with previous estimates, Dehant reported in the AGU’s poster. This gravitational estimate has found a core with a radius of about 1800 kilometers, which will take up more than half the diameter of the planet.

Harvard University mineral physicist and model, Rebecca Fisher, is not surprised by the signs of a liquid core. “It would be a big surprise if it weren’t for that,” he says. Other elements mixed with sulfur and iron help it stay melted when cold, as much as salt prevents icing. On Earth, the sensory motions of the molten outer core drive magnetic dynamos. But on Mars, those motions seem to have stopped long ago – and without a magnetic field, the planet’s atmosphere was sensitive to the sun’s cosmic rays and water was leaking into space.

Benardt hopes to sharpen this vague picture of the interior of the planet, and he thinks calm winds will make it possible soon. Two years after Earth, the first Mars year of the probe is coming to an end, and the quiet return of the first months of the mission is returning. “We’re looking forward to another second round of event detection. And even though the planet hasn’t cooperated yet, maybe the big one is ready to strike Mars like a Mars – a resurgence that will finally make everything clear,” says Benard.