Is There Life on Mars? NASA InSight Rover Detects Quakes

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The moon as seen from the red planet - Mars

Mars, the red planet, is humming. The source of this alien music remains unknown as the quiet, constant drone periodically pulses with the beat of quakes rippling around the planet. Does this mean that there is life on Mars?

This Martian hum is described in five studies just recently in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications. It was NASA's Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, or InSight, which detected seismic activity and ground vibration in the planet.

Since 1976, the InSight mission has only been NASA's eighth successful landing in Mars. On November 26, 2018, NASA's InSight mission landed in Elysium Planitia. InSight is used to develop a thorough understanding of the differentiation and subsequent thermal evolution of Mars that affects its surface geology and volatile process using information gathered by the InSight such as its interior structure, composition, and thermal state.

"It's such a relief to finally be able to stand up and shout, look at all this great stuff we're seeing," says principal investigator of the InSight mission, Bruce Banerdt.

Suzanne Smrekar, the deputy principal investigator of the Insight Mission said that one cannot make a model just from Earth but rather, more data points are still needed. "It's just super exciting that we some of these things, and that we are trying to understand Mars," she added.

Recording these movements could help scientists answer many questions that have remained unanswered for many decades now. Nicholas Schmerr, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland ponders on the question of life on Mars, "Can it support life, or did it ever? Life exists at the edge, where the equilibrium is off."

He added that like some areas here on Earth, we use energy from thermal vents deep in the ocean ridges to support life on our planet.

Schmerr also said that once the presence of the liquid magma is confirmed on Mars, scientists can locate which part of the planet is most geologically active and it might help future missions searching for potential life.

The InSight rover is said to be the first mission to focus directly on taking geophysical measurements of Mars that could provide an understanding of the red planet's interior structure and processes. The data is collected by both InSight and its seismometer, an instrument used to detect and record ground motions like an earthquake.

Within 235 Mars days, the scientists were able to pick up 174 marsquakes. 150 of those were categorized as high-frequency events similar to the ones recorded on the moon. The other 24 ground motions were classed as low-frequency quakes.

An associate professor of geology in UMD and co-author of the study, Vedran Lekic said that we can identify geologic layers within Mars and determine the distance and location to the source of quakes based on how the different waves propagate. The 24 low-frequency quakes were really exciting because through them we will be able to know how to analyze them and extract information about the subsurface structure.

Since the InSight is much more improved than those used in the previous missions, it can also provide important information about the weather on Mars. This includes the so-called dust devils, which are whirlwinds the humans would have to muddle through if one day they decide to colonized Mars.

Dust devils form in the morning with help from the Sun and in the afternoon when atmospheric pressure drops, but their occurrence eventually stops in the evening. This is definitely a factor when humans finally decide to spend their everyday lives on another planet.