Thanks to the NASA Insight probe launched in November 2018, we know a little more about the red planet.

Among the first discoveries that surprised scientists, the fact that Mars is twice as small as Earth, but that its core is the same size, big and above all light. 

This is the first time that we have explored the internal structure of a planet other than Earth.

Thanks to NASA's Insight probe and its seismometer designed by the French space agency, the heartbeats of Mars could be heard.

Two and a half years after its launch - in November 2018 - this probe measured the seismic activity of the red planet and recorded earthquakes, to better understand its core, but also its crust and mantle.

And the first results have just appeared in the famous American scientific journal

Science.

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Earthquakes have indeed been recorded inside Mars: in some places nothing, and then elsewhere, 600 earthquakes have been detected in 2 years.

If scientists imagined large earthquakes, they were surprised.

They are ultimately not very strong, at least not as strong as on Earth. 

A cooling planet

The seismometer installed on the surface listened to the tremors of the red planet up to 3000 km in depth.

And it is in the same area that they were spotted, as explained by Philippe Lognonné, geophysicist and main manager of this device.

“Surprisingly these are earthquakes that all come from the same region where we know that in the last ten million years there has been volcanic activity. So Mars has certainly cooled there. , magma came out to the surface and today we can see this cooling which continues ", he detailed. 

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Mars is therefore a cooling planet, and the average temperature there today is -60 degrees. Exploring its interior further should thus allow us to better understand how, 3 billion years ago, it became a cold, arid and inactive planet. In short, a hostile planet, while at the same time life was emerging on Earth.