"This helps to tie this to trying to figure out what the timing was between the various different activities," geophysicist Bruce Banerdt, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, told Inverse. These ancient periods have molded Mars into the planet that we are seeing and exploring today. The deeper layer looks to be some 3.6 billion years old, created during the Hesperian period when there was much more volcanic activity on the Red Planet. On Mars, the pattern of waves were consistent with two dense layers of rocks, such as basalt, with a thinner, less dense layer of material in the middle, most likely sedimentary in nature.įrom what we know about Mars' history from the craters still visible on the planet today, the researchers suggest the uppermost layer of hardened lava is around 1.7 billion years old, formed during the cold, arid Amazonian period on Mars when there were relatively few meteorite and asteroid impacts. The same technique was developed on Earth to assess subsurface composition and the associated earthquake risk. Here, the lander's instruments measured the slight ambient vibrations of the ground, caused by the winds flowing over the surface of the planet, in order to figure out what was out of view underneath. InSight arrived on Mars in November 2018, landing in the wide and flat plain known as Elysium Planitia. "Seismic studies of the shallow subsurface around the InSight landing site so far have been limited to the uppermost 10-20m using seismic-travel time measurements and ground compliance estimates, leaving structures at few tens to several hundreds of meters depth uncharted," the researchers explain in their paper. In particular, the lava flows can be connected to what we know of the planet's volcanic past.Ībove: Artist's impression of the InSight lander in the Homestead Hollow, a small impact crater. This could tell us a lot about how Mars was originally formed, how it evolved over time, and the sort of geological factors that are still in play today. The seismometer on board InSight – called SEIS or the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure – points to a shallow sedimentary layer sandwiched between hardened rocks resulting from lava flows, going down to a depth of around 200 meters or about 650 feet.
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