Spacecraft reveals first-ever peek inside Mars’s center

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The solar system’s god of war has a bigger heart than expected: Using humankind’s first seismometer on another planet, researchers have analyzed the interior structure of Mars for the first time, including its oversize liquid core.

The findings, published on July 22 across three studies in the journal Science, mark the latest scientific triumph for NASA’s InSight lander, which arrived at the flat equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia in November 2018. The stationary spacecraft has measured faint “marsquakes” rumbling through the planet since early 2019.

On Earth, seismic waves can reveal our planet’s inner structure by revealing boundaries deep underground where the waves’ speeds and directions change. InSight’s similar measurements of Martian temblors have let scientists detect distinct layers within the red planet, including the boundary of its roughly 2,300-mile-wide core.

“As a seismologist, you probably have one chance in your life to find a core for a planet,” says InSight team member Simon Stähler, a planetary seismologist at the research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland, interviewed by video call.

 Mars is just the third celestial body to have its core directly measured with seismic data, following Earth in the early 1900s and the moon in 2011.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/nasa-insight-spacecraft-reveals-first-peek-inside-mars-center

[56jae 176]

so its a ball of rock, yay

[sarahb 17,203]

I want it to find a giant alien fossil 

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On 7/23/2021 at 9:18 AM, 56jae said:

so its a ball of rock, yay

Yes, but for the first time they found how big the litosphere and crust are specifically (500 km and 24-72km). Also that the surface is pretty radioactive and unlike the earth Mars mantle has only a rocky layer (Earth has 2). They are also looking for a correlation between the new finds and the way the planet evolved, as it was known that it once possibly had water and Earth-like atmosphere and magnetic field. They also found out that the core is bigger than expected (almost 4k km) and they zoomed into how the crust looks specifically.