For those of us with a sweet tooth, the holiday season is an eternal bliss of sweet treats, so it’s in the spirit of this Christmas season that the folks at NASA have just revealed a picture of the internal makeup of the Red Planet as something resembling a three-tiered Cake.
The data that makes it possible to investigate Mars’ bakery-like makeup beneath its crust comes from the space agency’s Insight Mars lander, which sent back to scientists the first-ever geological decomposition of a planet other than Earth.
The intrepid probe discovered that Mars consists of a three-layer crust made up of different types of rocks stacked on top of each other, much like a cosmic birthday cake. These revelations will help astronomers, planetary geologists, and aerospace engineers understand more about the history of the Red Planet’s dark origins and evolution.
With the lander’s difficulty deploying and using its dig “mole” probe in the Martian soil, Insight turned and was fortunately able to collect details about the rock layers using a domed seismometer from the French space agency Center National d’Études. Spatiales (CNES).
By recording the nature of multiple seismic wave storms, scientists were able to analyze the thickness of each Martian slice at home and determine the duration and resistant path of the waves through these marchquakes.
First launched in May 2018, InSight, an acronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport mission, is a specialist robot lander designed to investigate the mysteries of Mars’ layout.
The main mission objectives are to explore the deep interior of the neighboring planet. It will land in the Elysium Planitia region near the equator of Mars on November 26, 2018, and continue to track and collect data that will help us understand the formation of the inner solar system’s rocky planets billions of years earlier.
Over the past year, InSight’s fixed position has detected hundreds of small earthquakes, most of which were no greater than magnitude 3.7, and collected the most comprehensive weather data from previous surface missions on Mars.
“After studying more than 480 marsquakes, we have enough data to answer some of these big questions,” said Bruce Banerdt, NASA researcher and lead investigator of InSight.
Preliminary research and the number of crunching estimates that each of Mars’ planetary layers is 12 to 23 miles thick, which is significantly 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 tease what nature has to tell you,” Banerdt added. “It’s more like trying to follow a trail of tricky clues than having the answers presented to us in a beautifully packaged package.”