For those of us with sweet teeth, the holiday season is the eternal bliss of sweet pleasures, so in the spirit of these juletic times, NASA people have just discovered a picture of the inner composition of the Red Planet as something resembling a three-layer cake.
The data, which enables the examination of Mars-like bakery makeup under its crust, comes thanks to the kind dock of the Insight Mars space agency, which sent scientists the first geological dissection of a planet other than Earth.
A fearless probe has discovered that Mars is made up of a three-layered crust made up of different types of rocks stacked on top of each other just like a cosmic birthday cake. These findings will help astronomers, planetary geologists and aeronautical engineers understand more of the history of the murky origins and evolution of the Red Planet.
With lander difficulties in setting up and using a probe to dig “moles” on Martian soil, Insight turned around and fortunately managed to gather details about the rock layers using a domed seismometer provided by the French space agency Center National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES).
By capturing the nature of multiple seismic wave storms, scientists at home were able to analyze the thickness of each slice of Mars and determine the duration of the waves and the resistance path through these marches.
First launched in May 2018, InSight, an acronym for Exploring the Interior Using the Missions of Seismic Testing, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a specialized robotic lander designed to explore the mysteries of Mars makeup.
Its main mission is 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 rocky planets in the inner solar system billions of years earlier.
Last year, InSight’s fixed position revealed hundreds of small earthquakes, most of which were no larger than 3.7, and it collected the most comprehensive weather data from any previous surface missions thrown to Mars.
“After studying over 480 marches, we have enough data to start answering some of these big questions,” said NASA researcher and InSight chief investigator Bruce Banerdt.
Preliminary research and the number of shrinkage estimates that each of the planets on Mars is 12 to 23 miles thick, which is significantly thicker than the ocean crust of the Earth, but thinner than the continental layer of our planet.
“Sometimes you get big flashes of incredible information, but most of the time you tease what nature has to tell you,” Banerdt added. “It’s more like trying to follow in the footsteps of awkward clues than having our answers presented in a nicely wrapped package.”