Through international collaboration, scientists find cause of InSights most powerful Marsquake

Date:
Sun, 22 Oct 2023 20:40:03 +0000

Description:
An international team of scientists has found the cause of the largest
Martian seismic event, The post Through international collaboration, scientists find cause of InSights most powerful Marsquake appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com .

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An international team of scientists has found the cause of the largest
Martian seismic event, or Marsquake, observed by NASAs Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) Mars lander. After ruling out a meteor impact, they concluded the event must have been caused by a release of stress within the planets crust.

The forceful quake occurred on May 4, 2022, at 23:23 UTC, on the 1222nd Martian day, or sol, of InSights mission. The quake, also known as S1222a,
was five times stronger than any event InSight had observed before. It shook the planet at a magnitude of 4.7 and the vibrations reverberated through Mars crust for approximately six hours.



The event showed similarities with earlier Martian seismic events, which have since been identified as meteor impacts, so scientists scoured the Martian surface for a possible impact crater. To do this, the team used observations from missions currently in orbit around Mars, engaging in an international collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA), the Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA).

This project represents a huge international effort to help solve the mystery of S1222a, and I am incredibly grateful to all the missions who contributed, said study lead Benjamin Fernando of the University of Oxford. I hope this project serves as a template for productive international collaborations in deep space. The area that was imaged in the search for a possible impact crater. The yellow star shows S1222as expected epicenter and the yellow rectangle is the primary search area. A, B, and C show the observations and D shows the probability map for the events epicenter. (Credit: Fernando et al.)

For the largest meteor impacts detected by InSight, scientists found craters with a diameter of up to 150 meters. If S1222a was also caused by a meteor impact, the team expected to find a crater with a diameter of 300 meters and
a blast zone that would be 180 kilometers across. Each contributing team looked for this potential crater using their spacecraft, comparing observations from before and after the Marsquake. See Also InSight Updates Space Science Coverage L2 Future Spacecraft Click here to Join L2

We are willing to collaborate with scientists around the world to share and apply this scientific data to get more knowledge about Mars, and are proud to have provided data from the color imagers on Tianwen-1 to contribute to this effort, said Jianjun Liu of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

But why did the team need observations from this many satellites?

Making the association between a given seismic event and a fresh crater is challenging, the scientists wrote. They can identify fresh craters by the presence of a blast zone, which fades over time but is easy to spot on lower-resolution images taken shortly after the impact. Depending on the impact terrain, however, blast zones can be obscured or less prevalent, so
the team still needed high-resolution images to exclude the possibility of an impact.

Another challenge is the low availability of high-resolution images from spacecraft in orbit. The high-resolution cameras on the satellites have
narrow fields of view and can only observe small areas at one time. Because
of this, the region may not have been imaged before the impact, making it impossible for the teams to compare before and after photos in the search for a fresh crater. NEW: A global team of scientists have confirmed the results
of a search for the source of the largest-ever seismic event recorded on
Mars.

The study suggests the quake was the result of enormous tectonic forces
within Mars crust. https://t.co/wuXo9T0W9v

University of Oxford (@UniofOxford) October 18, 2023



To overcome these hurdles, the scientists had to look at the combined output of all current missions in orbit around Mars.

This experiment shows how important it is to maintain a diverse set of instruments at Mars, and we are very glad to have played our part in completing the multi-instrumental and international approach of this study, said Daniela Tirsch, Science Coordinator for the High-Resolution Stereo
Camera onboard ESAs Mars Express Spacecraft.

With all observations combined, the team found no evidence of an impact
crater that could explain the measured seismic event and concluded that the Marsquake must thus have been a tectonic event in the planets own crust.

We still think that Mars doesnt have any active plate tectonics today, so
this event was likely caused by the release of stress within Mars crust, said Fernando These stresses are the result of billions of years of evolution; including the cooling and shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates.

This Marsquakes epicenter was located 2,200 kilometers from InSight, but well outside the Cerberus Fossae region which is known for its tectonic activity. Map showing InSights location (red triangle), the location of S1222as
expected epicenter (blue dot) and probability ellipse (blue), Cerberus Fossae (black lines) and the locations of other seismic events (purple dots). (Credit: Kawamura et al. (2023))

We still do not fully understand why some parts of the planet seem to have higher stresses than others, but results like these help us to investigate further, said Fernando. One day, this information may help us to understand where it would be safe for humans to live on Mars and where you might want to avoid!

The S1222a quake occurred near the end of InSights mission. By that time,
some of the landers sensors were turned off to conserve power as dust had begun accumulating on its solar panels, reducing the landers available power to less than 20% of the original capacity. Because of this, Fernandos team
was limited to using seismic data, as no measurements of atmospheric pressure and wind were recorded.

InSight was launched on May 5, 2018, by the United Launch Alliance atop its Atlas V 401 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The mission landed in Marss Elysium Planitia region on Nov. 26, 2018. When NASA retired the lander in December 2022, it had detected 1,319 Marsquakes. Currently, scientists are continuing to analyze InSights data even after the mission ended.

This has been a great opportunity for me to collaborate with the InSight
team, as well as with individuals from other major missions dedicated to the study of Mars, said Dimitra Atri of New York University Abu Dhabi, who contributed data from UAESAs Hope Spacecraft. This really is the golden age
of Mars exploration!

Fernando et al.s study was published in Geophysical Research Letters on Oct. 17, 2023.

(Lead image: Illustration showing InSight on the Martian surface. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The post Through international collaboration, scientists find cause of InSights most powerful Marsquake appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com .



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Link to news story:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/10/s1222a-origins/


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