Mars meteorite impacts reveal fresh information about planet's crust

tech.hindustantimes.com:

NASA's InSight mission collected data from two meteorite impacts on Mars that shed fresh light on the composition of the Martian crust. In the past, scientists had seen numerous earthquakes whose waves propagated into the planet's interior from the epicentre of the quake.

Since then, they had been anticipating a circumstance that would also result in waves that would travel across the planet's surface. The moment had arrived on December 24, 2021, when a meteorite struck Mars at a distance of roughly 3500 kilometres from InSight, creating a crater with a diameter of more than 100 metres and the desired surface waves.

A meteorite impact that occurred at a distance of fewer than 7,500 kilometres from InSight was also determined by the researchers to be the cause of a second shock. The University of Cologne's Institute of Geology and Meteorology's Dr Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun and Sebastian Carrasco took part in the evaluation of the information these two incidents supplied. Science has now published the findings.

Researchers value surface waves because they reveal details about the composition of the Martian crust. The Martian core, mantle, and crust have previously been revealed by the body waves that are generated during quakes and travel through the planet's interior. Although the data have only been gathered for one place on the planet, the crust is projected to have the highest degree of heterogeneity, similar to Earth.

According to Dr Doyeon Kim, the study's lead author and assistant professor at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, "Up until now, our knowledge of the Martian crust was based on only one point measurement under the InSight lander."

The geophysicist was shocked by the surface wave analysis's