A Mars lander that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base last year has measured and recorded what’s believed to be a “marsquake” for the first time.
The NASA mission to the Red Planet began with a blastoff of InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-3 on South Base on an extremely foggy morning on May 5, 2018.
In addition to InSight being Vandenberg’s first interplanetary mission, it has another link to the Central Coast through the explorer itself.
Now part of Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, employees at a facility in Goleta crafted InSight’s unique solar arrays designed to keep InSight’s vital systems charged.
InSight recorded the faint seismic signal, detected by the lander’s Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument, on April 6, the lander’s 128th Martian day, or sol.
Scientists say this is the first recorded trembling that appears to have come from inside the planet.
Other sounds previously picked up by InSight have been attributed to things above the surface, such as wind or the spacecraft’s robotic arm.
Scientists still are examining the data to determine the exact cause of the signal, according to NASA.
“We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology,” said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Scientists say the new seismic event was too small to provide solid data on the Martian interior, which is one of InSight’s main missions.
By comparison to Earth, the Martian surfsace is extremely quiet, allowing SEIS, InSight’s specially designed seismometer, to pick up faint rumbles.
Since Earth’s surface is quivering constantly from seismic noise created by oceans and weather, a quake of this size in Southern California would be lost among dozens occurring every day, according to scientists.
The InSight mission builds upon lessons and science from Apollo lunar trips when astronauts placed five seismometers to measure thousands of quakes while operating on the moon between 1969 and 1977.
“The Martian Sol 128 event is exciting because its size and longer duration fit the profile of moonquakes detected on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions,” said Lori Glaze, Planetary Science Division director at NASA Headquarters.
While InSight blasted off in May, it arrived as the Red Planet in late November, and began unpacking its instruments with a seismometer placed on the planet’s surface Dec. 19, 2018.
In studying the deep interior of Mars, scientists hope to learn how other rocky planets, along with the Earth and the moon, formed.
Three other seismic signals occurred on March 14 (Sol 105), April 10 (Sol 132) and April 11 (Sol 133) this year, but these signals were even smaller than the one credited to being a marsquake.
InSight team members, who had to wait an extra 26 months for this mission to get off the ground after technical troubles forced a delay, view the Sol 128 signal as an exciting milestone.
“We’ve been waiting months for a signal like this,” said Philippe Lognonné, SEIS team lead at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) in France. “It’s so exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still seismically active. We’re looking forward to sharing detailed results once we’ve had a chance to analyze them.”
To hear InSight’s captured audio recording of a marsquake, click here.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.