First 'Marsquake' Detected on Red Planet

There are earthquakes and moonquakes, and now a NASA spacecraft has detected what's believed to be a "marsquake" on the Red Planet. From a report: The spacecraft picked up the faint trembling of Mars's surface on 6 April, 128 days after landing on the planet last November. The quake is the first to be detected on a planetary body other than Earth or Moon. The shaking was relatively weak, the French space agency CNES said on 23 April. The seismic energy it produced was similar to that of the moonquakes that Apollo astronauts measured in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "We thought Mars was probably going to be somewhere between Earth and the Moon" in terms of seismic activity, says Renee Weber, a planetary scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "It's still very early in the mission, but it's looking a bit more Moon-like than Earth-like," she says. It's not yet clear whether the shaking originated within Mars or was caused by a meteorite crashing into the planet's surface.

Star Wars...

[That YouTube Guy]

Could be an Imperial probe droid landing on the other side of Mars. Rebel scrum are everywhere these days.

Re:

[Nidi62]

Rebel scrum are everywhere these days.

Yeah, they need to just give up and join the rest of the Empire in playing association football instead of rugby.

What's the mechanism?

[OneHundredAndTen]

Mars has no plate tectonics, I believe. What is causing the marsquakes? I imagine that meteorite impacts will contribute. What else?

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[Narcocide]

Subterranean alien digging machines!!

Mars has methane

[Latent Heat]

Alien fracking.

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[Tablizer]

Crashing probes :-) Mars is a probe eater.

Mars probably has a molten interior such that there should be some rumbling and growling going on inside. And there are hints that lava occasionally still makes it way to the surface, or at least close to the surface. How much so is one of the questions the seismometer system will hopefully answer.

And meteor strikes can reveal features of Mars' inner structure, as the shock wave bounces around the planet's layers, making Mars ring like a subtle bell. One can make in

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[Nidi62]

Mars has no plate tectonics, I believe. What is causing the marsquakes? I imagine that meteorite impacts will contribute. What else?

Marvin finally realized he should test his Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator before trying to destroy Earth.

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[RockDoctor]

Plate tectonics is not the only way to trigger fault ruptures. It could be moving magma (a side effect of the slow cooling of the planet). It could be slumping of the sides of a relaxed magma chamber - eruptions on Mars may be continuing to essentially today. (Well, several million years. Negligibly different to "today" if you're a geologist.) [Added : ] Sand/ granule movement is almost still certainly happening today. Rockfall from cliffs will also happen, and if it's in a narrow canyon, it may well escape

Dubious claim

[Tablizer]

The quake is the first to be detected on a planetary body other than Earth or Moon.

That may not be true. [drewexmachina.com]

The Viking 2 lander had a functioning seismometer that picked up signals. However, wind vibrations made it difficult to interpret the results. (Unfortunately, Viking 1's seismometer malfunctioned, making it hard to corroborate candidate large-scale quake signals.)

A better summary would be to say the new probe is the first to definitively detect quakes on another planet.

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[Tablizer]

What rule of language is that? (Yes, it's pedantic squabbling, but that's what nerds do.)

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[Tablizer]

Based on that response, we may both be autistic.

Rock puzzle

[Tablizer]

Article: Mission controllers are still trying to figure out how to unstick its German-built heat probe. It became lodged on what is probably a buried rock in February, as it tried to hammer itself into the ground to measure temperatures there.

I'm still puzzled why they didn't anticipate subsurface rocks in the design? Rocks are all over the surface such that unless something specific told them it was clean underneath, the logical assumption should be plenty of buried rocks also such that they would plan and

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[RockDoctor]

They thought they'd worked out a way to get around what they thought was the distribution of rocks of different sizes in the regolith. Reality differed from what they thought. So, they're trying to work out a different way of using the same tools - in the same way that they got around the partial failure of the drilling tool on Curiosity a while away.

That's how both engineering and science work - incremental improvement on designs to get better at doing whichever job you're trying.

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[Tablizer]

what they thought was the distribution of rocks of different sizes in the regolith.

If they estimated there would be very few subsurface large rocks, I wonder how they came to such a conclusion, and why they seemed fairly sure of their estimate so as to not have a ready Plan B.

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[RockDoctor]

Not being part of the design team, I don't know. But I've seen 3 oil wells fail (need re-spudded, cost a megabuck apiece) because of unexpected boulder collapse into the early borehole, and I've seen more drill strings lost to deeper collapses (including pink concrete jobs - if you lose radioactive sources in the hole, and you can't retrieve them, you pour pink concrete. And it's part of my job to make sure that we don't accidentally re-enter the old wellbore by watching for the pink concrete.). Predicting

Sounds like California

[jfdavis668]

Next thing you know they will ban plastic straws on Mars.