The Mars lander launched by NASA created the first ever underground map of Mars by listening to the wind
The sound of the wind revealed details of the underground morphology of Mars.
Illustration: An artist's concept of the shallow subsurface conditions explored by NASA's InSight Mars lander. (Image credit: ETH Zurich/Géraldine Zenhäusern)
Researchers created the first map of the Martian subsurface by listening to the sound of winds reverberating through layers of soil and rock near the Martian equator.
The research team used NASA (hereinafter referred to as NASA) InSight probe - which landed on the flat "Elysium Planitia" in 2018 to study the weak "Mars quakes" that are sweeping the planet. Needle probing instrument. The data obtained by InSight will apparently allow scientists to get a rough idea of the underground organization of Mars, including the nature of its mantle and the thickness of its crust.
A team led by a Swiss geophysicist has for the first time used a new technology developed and fine-tuned on Earth to allow the lander's instruments to directly peer into the lower layers of Mars' dry surface, exploring it 660 feet (200 meters) above the crust. things within.
"We are applying a technology that is well developed on Earth to identify seismic risk sites and study underground structures," says N. Cedric Schweschbach, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. A geographer at the Institute of (ETH) and the corresponding author of the new paper told Space.
"This technology works based on environmental vibrations," Schweischbach said. "On Earth, humans have oceans and winds, which make the ground shake all the time. When people measure the vibration at a certain point, it will leave an underground mark."
Approaching the truth
In essence, the chaotic movement of the earth's surface causing the earth's crust to continuously vibrate. These extremely small vibrations will be infinitely amplified as they travel deep underground, and will eventually be captured by sensitive instruments.
Mars, Schweschbach said, is much quieter than Earth. There are no oceans on the planet, and Mars' atmosphere is much thinner, making winds there weaker and more elusive. Plus geologists have access to countless monitoring stations on Earth, whereas on Mars they have only one option: the InSight lander.
However, listening to the winds generated by the interaction of the Red Planet's craters and plains beneath the ground revealed surprising details in the underground structure.
"The deeper we dig underground, the lower the resolution," Schweschbach said. "Close to the surface, we can resolve layers a meter (three feet) thick. But deeper down, we can actually only resolve Resolved in tens of meters." (10 meters = 33 feet)
This map allows humans to glimpse the evolution of Mars over the past few billion years. It revealed an unexpected layer of deep sediments as well as thick layers of solidified lava, all capped by a 10-foot-thick (3 meters) sandy regolith.
Illustration: Artist's complete concept of the shallow underground beneath NASA's Mars lander. (Image source ETH Zurich / Géraldine Zenhäusern)
This surprising sedimentary layer is located in the lower half of the Martian surface, 100 to 230 feet (30 to 70 meters) above sea level, sandwiched between two layers of solidified ancient lava between.
"We are still working on how to retroactively determine the age of this layer," he said. "But it tells us that the geological history of that site may be more complex than we first thought, and that there may have been more geological changes in the past."
The researchers compared the two lava layers containing this deposit with previous Geological studies of nearby craters were compared. The data allowed them to roughly frame the origin of these formations on Mars about 1.7 billion and 3.6 billion years ago, two important periods in Mars' geological history.
On top of the younger lava layer, just below the surface regolith, is a strip of rocky material about 50 feet thick (15 meters), likely formed by past meteorite impacts that removed them from the Martian surface. Regular motion rose into the air and then rained back onto the Martian surface. In the future, the scientists hope to see them expand their technology even further, based several miles beneath the Martian crust.
"We still have a blind spot in this area right now," Schweschbach said.
Early studies of Mars' core, mantle and crust based on InSight data revealed surprising differences between Mars and Earth. The two planets are generally considered to be twins of the solar system, and to some extent their evolutionary paths are so similar that they seem to share the same set of genes.
Both planets formed wide oceans and thick atmospheres at the beginning. But later, Mars lost its protective magnetic field, which allowed the rough solar wind, the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun, to gradually strip away its atmosphere, and Mars developed into what it is today, a different planet compared to Earth. A world. Scientists hope that the comparison of geology research on the two planets will provide some clues as to why they "parted ways" today.
BY: Tereza Pultarova
FY: Yu Jie
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