The NASA Insight probe detected the strongest earthquake on Mars, an extraterrestrial planet, on the 4th (local time), IT media Cnet reported on the 10th.
It is the most powerful earthquake of magnitude 5 and the largest of 1,300 earthquakes recorded since the Insight landing on Mars in November 2018. InSight also observed a magnitude 4.2 earthquake in September last year.
“Since we put our seismographs down on Mars in December 2018, we’ve been waiting for something big,” Bruce Banerdt, senior research fellow at Insight, said in a statement. “Scientists will analyze this data to reveal new facts regarding Mars for years to come.”
A magnitude 5 earthquake is not very large on Earth, but it exceeds the limits of what scientists expected an earthquake on Mars. NASA said the earthquake was “the largest ever detected on any other planet.”
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Recently, the InSight spacecraft suffered from difficulties in obtaining power due to dust accumulation on the solar panels due to a dust storm that struck Mars. NASA later used the InSight’s robotic arm to blow the dust off the side of the solar panel to shake off the dust.
The data collected by the InSight seismometer is expected to help researchers in the future understand how rocky planets such as Mars and Earth formed and evolve.
