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Martian crater
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/AFP
In the past year, the Mars probe »InSight« repeatedly registered earthquakes of varying strength.
Mars also trembled on Christmas Eve 2021.
The extremely sensitive seismometer on the NASA probe recorded the vibrations and sent the data to Earth the next day.
It was rather quiet there over the holidays and so the scientists only discovered at the beginning of January that "InSight" had recorded more than a thousand small tremors.
"We were immediately enthusiastic," one of the project managers, Mark Panning, describes the moment in the "New York Times".
During their investigations, his team then made a surprising discovery: the tremors on the red planet were most likely not triggered by tensions inside the planet.
Rather, rocks that fell from space on Mars could have been the cause, the researchers suspect in their study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
150 km wide crater
The meteorite impact was also confirmed by satellite observations.
Accordingly, a 150-kilometer crater has formed.
The discovery could now help scientists explore the interior of Mars.
In addition, it has been proven that Mars, like Earth, is hit by meteorites.
During the earthquake on Christmas Eve, surface waves could be measured for the first time, i.e. vibrations that propagate along the outer rocky crust on the surface of Mars.
In all other marsquakes, the »InSight« seismometer had only observed so-called body waves, which propagate from the interior of the planet.
In contrast to Earth, however, Mars has no plate tectonics, i.e. no moving crust.
However, earthquakes caused by the interior of the planet also occur on Mars.
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