They have detected the most powerful earthquake ever to occur on Mars

Earthquake (‘swamp‘, as these phenomena on Mars are known) occurred on May 4 and were of magnitude 4.7, five-tenths stronger than the previous strongest earthquake, was recorded in August 2021 and had a magnitude of about 4.2. The quagmire was so strong that InSight continued to detect unprecedented seismic waves for about 10 hours, while the aftermath of all Martian earthquakes subsided within an hour.

“The energy released by this single quake is equivalent to the cumulative energy of all the other earthquakes we’ve observed so far,” he explained during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. John Clinton, a seismologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and co-author of the study. “Although the event occurred more than 2,000 kilometers away, the waves recorded in InSight were so large that they almost saturated our seismometer.”

InSight launched in May 2018 and landed on Mars in late November of that year. Since then, he has been using his seismometer to detect seismic activity on the Red Planet. Something, in theory, should be more difficult to unravel here, because our neighbor’s geology was considered almost zero until recently. However, InSight along with other assignments revealed that The red planet is more active than he thought.

Specifically, the marshy recording provides new information about Mars, as wave motions across the planet reveal new insights into its crust, mantle, and core. “For the first time we’ve been able to identify surface waves, which move along the crust and upper mantle, and which have cycled around the planet many times,” Clinton said.

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The seismic event in May was also unusual in that the epicenter was not close to known areas of activity. It also showed characteristics of both types of earthquakes that have been distinguished so far: high-frequency waves with fast but shorter vibrations, and lower-frequency waves with greater amplitude.

NASA said InSight has only weeks to live before it stops working due to dust buildup on the power-generating solar panels. However, the probe has already passed its primary mission life of two years on Earth.