NASA's InSight lander has finally detected 3 big Mars quakes, including one that lasted nearly 90 minutes.
NASA's Insight lander was sitting silently in the empty dust plains of Mars on Saturday, as it had for the past 1,000 Martian days, when the ground began to rumble.
The shaking continued for nearly an hour and a half.
The robot beamed the data from its seismometer back to Earth, and NASA scientists realized they had what they'd been waiting for: a big quake. Insight had recorded a magnitude 4.2 Mars quake.
Two other big ones recently rolled through, too: On August 25, the lander felt two quakes of magnitudes 4.2 and 4.1. Before these, the biggest quake the lander had felt was a 3.7 in 2019.
Mars quakes have revealed an Earth-like planet with a moon-like crust
InSight has detected more than 700 quakes in total, and they've revealed a lot about the planet's interior already. Scientists have learned that Mars' crust is thinner than they thought, and that it's more like the moon's crust than Earth's.
Because the Martian crust is so dry and broken, its quakes last much longer than earthquakes. They reverberate between cracks in the crust, and there's not as much moisture to absorb them. So the quakes InSight has felt have typically lasted 10 to 40 minutes.
Yorum Gönder