NASA's robotic probe InSight has detected and measured what scientists believe to be a "marsquake," marking the first time a likely tremor has been recorded on another planet, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California reports.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The breakthrough came nearly five months after InSight, the first spacecraft designed specifically to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down on the surface of Mars to begin its two-year seismological mission on the red planet.
The faint rumble characterised by JPL scientists as a likely marsquake, roughly equal to a 2.5 magnitude earthquake, was recorded on April 6 - the lander's 128th Martian day, or sol.
It was detected by InSight's French-built seismometer, an instrument sensitive enough to measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.
"We've been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology," InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said in a news release.
Scientists are still examining the data to conclusively determine the precise cause of the signal, but the trembling appeared to have originated from inside the planet, as opposed to being caused by forces above the surface, such as wind.
"The high frequency level and broad band is very similar to what we get from a rupture process. So we are very confident that this is a marsquake," Philippe Lognonne, a geophysics and planetary science professor at University Paris Diderot in France and lead researcher for InSight's seismometer, said in an email.
Still, a tremor so faint in Southern California would be virtually lost among the dozens of small seismic crackles that occur there every day.
"Our informed guesswork is that this a very small event that's relatively close, maybe from 50 to 100 kilometres away" from the lander, Banerdt told Reuters by telephone.
A more distant quake would yield greater information about Mars' interior because seismic waves would "penetrate deeper into the planet before they come back up to the seismometer," he said.
The size and duration of the marsquake also fit the profile of some of the thousands of moonquakes detected on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1977 by seismometers installed there by NASA's Apollo missions, said Lori Glaze, planetary science division director at NASA headquarters in Washington.
Mars and the moon lack tectonic plates. Their seismic activity is instead driven by a cooling and contracting process that causes stress to build up and become strong enough to rupture the crust.
Australian Associated Press
