• chevron_right

      InSight and Mars orbiter use impacts to give new info on Mars’ interior

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 27 October, 2022 - 21:16 · 1 minute

    The cracked terrain of Cerberus Fossae appears to be the source of most of the seismic activity on Mars.

    Enlarge / The cracked terrain of Cerberus Fossae appears to be the source of most of the seismic activity on Mars. (credit: Image courtesy of ETH Zurich)

    On Thursday, NASA announced that the InSight lander was continually losing power after dust coated its solar panels. The agency expects that it will probably lose contact with the lander within the next two months. But it is going out in style, as its onboard seismometer picked up the largest impacts we've observed since we put a high-resolution camera in orbit around the red planet.

    Not only does the seismic data tell us a lot about the structure of Mars' crust, but it has validated a technique used to extract positional information from a single seismometer. That technique indicates that roughly half the seismic energy that InSight has picked up comes from a single location on Mars.

    Impactful events

    The cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have been observing Mars for 16 years. Before 2021, they had not observed any impacts that formed a crater over 130 meters across. In 2021, it spotted two. One of them was not especially useful. MRO imaging didn't capture exactly when the impact occurred, and it was far enough from the site of the InSight lander that direct seismic waves ran into the planet's core, which meant that only indirect seismic energy reached the instruments on InSight.

    Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    • chevron_right

      Leftover hardware from Mars mission to be used on the Moon

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 26 October, 2022 - 17:51 · 1 minute

    Image of two landers on the surface of the Moon.

    Enlarge / One of the designs for NASA's commercial lunar delivery service. (credit: Intuitive Machines )

    On May 5, 2022, the seismometer on board the InSight lander recorded a quake of magnitude 4.7 on the Martian surface, despite the epicenter being 2,250 km from the lander. It was one of the largest quakes recorded on Mars and the largest recorded by the Insight mission. In September, in the first measurement of its kind, the instrument registered a quake generated by a meteorite impact on Mars.

    InSight’s seismometer is called the Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure (or SEIS), and it has recorded these and 20 odd additional quakes. Now, an instrument based on the same design will measure ground vibrations on the far side of the Moon, the first seismographs on our neighbor since the Apollo era.

    Down to SEIS

    Developed by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and the French space agency CNES, the SEIS Very Broad Band (VBB) seismometer that’s now on Mars can detect the tiniest movements—to the tune of 10 picometers, which is much smaller than an atom. Consisting of three pendulums placed at 120 degrees to each other, SEIS measures the vertical and horizontal vibrations of the Martian surface.

    Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments