Shady Abdel Hafez

A joint international team announced that the first results from the "Insight" spacecraft that is now orbiting on the surface of Mars, indicate that the planet Mars is vibrant with seismic activity, which means that the planet may have been able to contain life in the distant past.

The results of those discoveries came in five new studies in the Nature journal and one in the Nature Geosciences, all released on February 24, to say that the seismic scale in the vehicle has captured, over the course of 235 Martian days, 174 seismic events.

According to one new study, most of those earthquakes were of high frequency similar to that observed in the moon before, and some of these earthquakes showed a pattern similar to what is happening on the planet Earth.

In addition, the insight's capture of some low-frequency seismic waves enabled its team to understand the structure of the geological layers of Mars, and also enabled them to determine the distance between the insight and the source of earthquakes.

Insight on Mars
The Insight mission began in May 2018 and arrived in Mars in November of the same year after a flight of 483 million km. The spacecraft landed on Mars in an area called "Elysium Planetia".

The surface of Mars is vibrant with seismic activity (NASA)

Insight is a purely geological mission, aimed at exploring mainly what lies below the surface of Mars, so its seismograph is the most accurate ever, as it can capture seismic movements that are 500 times fainter than Earth's.

In addition, this scale helps in studying the weather of Mars, because some events such as winds or hurricanes have a slight impact on the stability of the Earth's crust, an effect that Insight devices can monitor and learn about its causes.

Magnetism in the rocks
On the other hand, the mission aims to study the deep magnetic field of Mars, where it is lost now, but magnetic fields can leave their impact on the rocks over millions of billions of years, so examining rocks with a depth of several tens of meters can be a good opportunity to understand Mars’s magnetism. .

According to one new study, the magnetic measuring device on the back of "Insight" had picked up clear magnetic activity in one of the areas that could only be emitted from deep rocks beneath the ground.

Understanding the geology of Mars is essential to understanding the existence of life on it, now or ever, and the Insight team hopes that it will soon be able to find active geological points that may be a suitable locus for that.