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<\/p>\nAn international team of scientists has found the cause of the largest Martian seismic event, or Marsquake, observed by NASA\u2019s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) Mars lander. After ruling out a meteor impact, they concluded the event must have been caused by a release of stress within the planet\u2019s crust.<\/p>\n
The forceful quake occurred on May 4, 2022, at 23:23 UTC, on the 1222nd Martian day, or sol, of InSight\u2019s mission. The quake, also known as S1222a, was five times stronger than any event InSight had observed before. It shook the planet at a magnitude of 4.7 and the vibrations reverberated through Mars\u2019 crust for approximately six hours.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The event showed similarities with earlier Martian seismic events, which have since been identified as meteor impacts, so scientists scoured the Martian surface for a possible impact crater. To do this, the team used observations from missions currently in orbit around Mars, engaging in an international collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA), the Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA).<\/p>\n
\u201cThis project represents a huge international effort to help solve the mystery of S1222a, and I am incredibly grateful to all the missions who contributed,\u201d said study lead Benjamin Fernando of the University of Oxford. \u201cI hope this project serves as a template for productive international collaborations in deep space.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The area that was imaged in the search for a possible impact crater. The yellow star shows S1222a\u2019s expected epicenter and the yellow rectangle is the primary search area. A, B, and C show the observations and D shows the probability map for the event\u2019s epicenter. (Credit: Fernando et al.)<\/p>\n
For the largest meteor impacts detected by InSight, scientists found craters with a diameter of up to 150 meters. If S1222a was also caused by a meteor impact, the team expected to find a crater with a diameter of 300 meters and a blast zone that would be 180 kilometers across. Each contributing team looked for this potential crater using their spacecraft, comparing observations from before and after the Marsquake.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are willing to collaborate with scientists around the world to share and apply this scientific data to get more knowledge about Mars, and are proud to have provided data from the color imagers on Tianwen-1 to contribute to this effort,\u201d said Jianjun Liu of Chinese Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n
But why did the team need observations from this many satellites?<\/p>\n
SpaceX launch tickets (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n \u201cMaking the association between a given seismic event and a fresh crater is challenging,\u201d the scientists wrote. They can identify fresh craters by the presence of a blast zone, which fades over time but is easy to spot on lower-resolution images taken shortly after the impact. Depending on the impact terrain, however, blast zones can be obscured or less prevalent, so the team still needed high-resolution images to exclude the possibility of an impact.<\/p>\n Another challenge is the low availability of high-resolution images from spacecraft in orbit. The high-resolution cameras on the satellites have narrow fields of view and can only observe small areas at one time. Because of this, the region may not have been imaged before the impact, making it impossible for the teams to compare before and after photos in the search for a fresh crater.<\/p>\n