Marsquakes Reveal Planetary Core
In three new papers, scientists analyzed data from NASA’s InSight lander to reveal the structure of Mars and its crust, lithosphere, mantle, and core.
It has been an exciting week in the world of space science, with some revolutionary stories being published. Let’s look at the results from three separate papers released this week in the journal Science on the structure of Mars. The teams involved analyzed data from NASA’s InSight lander. Remember how we told you about how InSight’s seismometer detected hundreds of marsquakes? Similar to how we used earthquakes to understand the internal structure of Earth, these teams did the same for Mars.
First, scientists had to work based on the assumption that Mars might be similar to Earth, with a series of layers: the crust, the mantle, and the core. It’s a little more complicated than that, but it’s a good, basic starting point for understanding a planet’s structure. And as lead author Amir Khan explains: Now seismic data has confirmed that Mars presumably was once completely molten before dividing into the crust, mantle, and core we see today, but that these are different from Earth’s.”
Let’s start at the surface and work our way in. The crust under InSight, which is near the Martian equator, is between 15 and 47 kilometers thick, which is relatively thin compared to Earth where the crust can…
