InSight also found that Mars has a lot of earthquakes. It found 1,318 of them.
Washington NASA said Thursday (Oct. 27) that the InSight lander, which has been sitting on the surface of Mars since 2018, will run out of power in four to eight weeks and stop working. At the same time, scientists were talking about a big meteorite strike that NASA found that tore boulder-sized chunks of ice surprisingly close to the planet’s equator.
A dust storm is building up on the solar panels that power the US space agency’s stationary lander, and a dust storm is making it worse. This is draining the lander’s batteries, said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Bruce Banerdt, who is in charge of the InSight mission.
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The original plan for InSight’s mission was for it to last two years, but it was changed to four years because it helped show how Mars is built and how it shakes. Banerdt said that when the power runs out, NASA will lose touch with InSight.
Banerdt told Reuters, “Insight has been more successful than I could have imagined.” “We know how thick the crust is, how big and dense the core is, and what the structure of the mantle is like. For the first time, we now have a detailed map of the deep inside of a planet other than Earth and the moon.
InSight also found that Mars has a lot of earthquakes. It found 1,318 of them.
Two research papers that were published in the journal Science talked about meteorites that hit the surface of Mars in September and December. The impacts sent out seismic waves that revealed new information about the structure of Mars’ crust, which is the planet’s outer layer.
The head of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, Lori Glaze, told reporters, “What a great way to end a capstone science project! It’s like going out with a bang. ”
A space rock with a diameter of 5–12 m crashed on December 24 in a place called Amazonis Planitia, making a crater about 150 m wide and 21 m deep. This was a very interesting event.
It caused a quake with a magnitude of 4.0, which was picked up by InSight’s seismometer. Cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the crater from space. At the edge of the crater, there were big chunks of ice that looked like boulders.
About once a year, something that big comes into Earth’s atmosphere, but most of the time, it burns up in Earth’s thicker atmosphere.
“This impact exposed a lot of water ice,” said Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist from Brown University who is part of the InSight science team. “This was a surprise because this is the warmest place on Mars and the closest we’ve ever seen water ice to the equator.”
Glaze said that even though it is known that there is ice near the poles of Mars, future missions to explore the planet would try to put astronauts as close to the equator as possible, where it is warmer. The ice near the equator could be used to make things like drinking water and rocket fuel.
Glaze said, “If we had access to ice at these lower latitudes, we could turn it into water, oxygen, or hydrogen, which could be very useful.”
The crater from September 2021 was also big, measuring about 130m across. The two were the biggest hits that InSight has seen since it got to Mars.
For the first time, InSight saw seismic waves moving along the surface of Mars instead of deeper in the planet’s body. The sound waves from the two impacts showed how the crust was formed over a large area in the northern hemisphere.
The three-legged InSight sits in Elysium Planitia, a large, mostly flat plain just north of the equator. Up until now, InSight had only studied the area right below its landing site to learn about the structure of the Martian crust, which is mostly made of fine-grained volcanic basalt rock.
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At the landing site, the crust was made up of relatively soft, less dense rock. In the other areas covered by the new data, where the crust seems to be denser, this was not the case.
As a result of our analysis of surface waves, we now know that the crust of Mars north of the equatorial dichotomy has a relatively uniform structure, “said seismologist Doyeon Kim of the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, who led one of the studies. The equatorial dichotomy is a prominent feature on Mars that separates the southern highlands from the northern lowlands.
