InSight’s seismometer, seen in the lower left of this artist’s rendition of the lander, recently detected Mars’ largest known quake. Any Martians out there should learn to duck and cover.
On May 4, the Red Planet was rocked by a roughly magnitude 5 temblor, the largest Marsquake detected to date, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reports. The shaking lasted for more than six hours and released more than 10 times the energy of the previous record-holding quake.
The U.S. space agency’s InSight lander, which has been studying Mars’ deep interior since touching down on the planet in 2018 (SN: 11/26/18), recorded the event. The quake probably originated near the Cerberus Fossae region, which is more than 1,000 kilometers from the lander. Cerberus Fossae is known for its fractured surface and frequent rockfalls. It makes sense that the ground would be shifting there, says geophysicist Philippe Lognonné, principal investigator of the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, InSight’s seismometer. “It’s an ancient volcanic bulge.”
Just like earthquakes reveal information about our planet’s interior structure, Marsquakes can be used to probe what lies beneath Mars’ surface (SN: 7/22/21). And a lot can be learned from studying this whopper of a quake, says Lognonné, of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. “The signal is so good, we’ll be able to work on the details.” Before the helicopter arrived, scientists had two perspectives of Mars. “We have pictures taken from orbit around Mars, and then we have pictures taken by rovers driving on the ground,” says planetary scientist Kirsten Siebach of Rice University in Houston, who is not part of the Ingenuity team. “But now this has opened up an entirely new perspective on Mars.”
Ingenuity has surpassed all expectations. It has shown not only that flight is possible but also what is possible with flight. Science News discussed the helicopter’s big moments, collaboration with the rover and upcoming flights with Håvard Fjær Grip. He’s Ingenuity’s chief pilot and an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. His answers were edited for length and clarity. The biggest part of the job is planning the flights. Ingenuity doesn’t know where it is or where it wants to go when it wakes up, so all of those decisions are made here [on Earth]. Every maneuver that the helicopter makes during the flight is planned here on the ground first, and then we uplink the instructions to Ingenuity. When it comes time to fly, it uses its onboard software to follow our instructions as precisely as possible. It is pretty great. We came there expecting to perform at most five flights within the 30-day window. And all of that was going to happen within in a small area that we carefully selected. We spent weeks figuring out exactly where to place the helicopter, studying these tiny little rocks. Everything was mapped out. And then things went so well when we started flying that almost immediately people started thinking, “Wow, let’s try to make use of this beyond those five flights.”
We started this next phase where, to be useful at all, we had to fly away from this carefully selected area. I’m really proud of that. We’ve been able to take this technology that was designed for this very limited mission and extend it to go and land different places on Mars and to travel across terrain that, originally, we had never planned on traveling across.
It’s lasted now for over a year since we deployed it to the surface. I don’t think any of us had imagined that that would be possible.
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