For those of us with sweet teeth, the holiday season is a perpetual bliss of sweet delights, so in the spirit of these yuletide times, NASA people have just revealed an image of the inner composition of the Red Planet as something resembling a three-layer cake. .
Data to examine Mars’ bakery makeup under its shell is provided by the Insight Mars lander, which sent scientists back the first geological dissection of a planet other than Earth.
The bold probe discovered that Mars is made up of a three-layer crust made up of different types of rocks stacked on top of each other just like a cosmic birthday cake. These revelations will help astronomers, planetary geologists and aerospace engineers understand more about the history of the turbulent origins and evolution of the Red Planet.
With the lander’s difficulty in deploying and using its “mole” probe in Martian soil, Insight pivoted and fortunately managed to gather details of the rock layers using a dome seismometer provided by the French space agency, Center National d’Études Spatiales (CNES).
By capturing the nature of several seismic storms, home scientists were able to analyze the thickness of each slice of Mars and determine the duration of the time of the waves and the resilient path of the waves through these earthquakes.
First launched in May 2018, InSight, an acronym for exploring the interior using seismic investigations, geodesy and the heat transport mission, is a robotic lander specially designed to investigate the mysteries of Mars’ makeup.
His main mission objectives are to explore the deep interior of the neighboring planet. Landing in the Elysium Planitia region near the Martian equator on November 26, 2018, it continues to monitor and collect data that helps us understand the formation of the rocky planets of the inner solar system billions of years earlier.
Last year, InSight’s fixed position detected hundreds of small earthquakes, most of which did not exceed magnitude 3.7, and collected the most comprehensive meteorological data of any previous surface mission that fell to Mars.
“After studying more than 480 earthquakes, we have enough data to begin answering some of these big questions,” said NASA researcher and InSight chief investigator Bruce Banerdt.
Preliminary research and the reduction in numbers estimate that each of the planetary layers of Mars is between 12 and 23 miles thick, which is considerably thicker than the oceanic crust of the Earth, but thinner than the continental layer of our planet.
“Sometimes you get big flashes of amazing information, but most of the time you erase what nature has to say,” Banerdt added. “It’s more like trying to keep track of complicated clues than presenting the answers in a nicely packaged package.”