The InSight Lander has detected seismic activity on the Red Planet.
This is all thanks to NASA’s InSight lander that successfully managed to place its hypersensitive seismometer on Mars. The seismometer was specifically designed to detect what scientists call ‘marsquakes’ in the hopes of solving mysteries about the planet’s interior make-up. To the surprise of scientists though, it managed to pick up something quite different: Microseisms is what they’re called.
“We do believe that these signals are waves coming from Mars,” says planetary seismologist at Paris Diderot University, Philippe Lognonné, who also heads the team that’s in charge of the seismometer. He added that this is the first time that such microseisms were detected on another planet, let alone Mars.
On Earth, however, they are definitely not unheard of. Microseisms are caused mainly by ocean movements brought about by storms and large tides. Mars has no oceans; instead, its microseisms are apparently caused by “low-frequency pressure waves from atmospheric winds that rattle the surface, inducing shallow, longer-period waves in the surface, called Rayleigh waves,” according to Lognonné.
Although scientists are still waiting for an actual marsquake, microseisms are also a great way to understand the features beneath the surface of Mars. Lognonné says that the seismologists’ next goal is to be able to probe the surface crust that has grown rigid right around the lander.
