![]() When you were at school, you might have learned that measuring an earthquake requires three stations so you can triangulate its origin. The hard part was how to get by using only one of them. The designers needed to adjust for the different level of gravity, and the instrument needed to be extremely sensitive to pick up small shakes. Seismometers are a fairly basic piece of equipment, and given how much experience we have using them on Earth, adjusting them for Mars is conceptually simple. As a bonus, this means InSight is also a tiny little Martian weather station, and has provided years of data on the weather in the Elysium Planitia region where it is located. To allow for environmental differences day to day, InSight also measures factors like temperature, pressure, and wind speed using weather sensors, so these factors can be subtracted from the seismic data. “and as quiet as possible, because you’re making these incredibly sensitive measurements.” When it comes to choosing a landing spot for seismic measurements, “You basically want somewhere that’s as boring as possible,” Johnson said. It’s also located in a very quiet region. Instead, you want something that stays in exactly the same place for months or years, which is why InSight is a stationary lander. To detect tiny shakes from the surface, you don’t want a rover that moves around. Image used with permission by copyright holder ![]() That means the right instrument can study those quakes and the way they bounce around the planet’s interior to learn more about its structure. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics today, but it is shaken by similar quakes called marsquakes. The Earth has tectonic plates that shift and move over millions of years, causing earthquakes when they rub together. And its results have been, if you’ll excuse the pun, out of this world. That was the justification for including a seismometer instrument on the InSight lander, which was the first seismometer ever landed on another planet. We learn about Earth’s interior structure by looking at how seismic waves travel through the planet, and we can do the same thing on Mars. ![]() “Each mission results in a big leapfrog forward in our understanding.”īut it’s hard enough to analyze samples from Mars’s surface using rovers - how can you possibly tell what the interior of a planet located hundreds of millions of miles away is like? Fortunately, we have an idea of how to do this because we have practice from studying Earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |