The most powerful marsquake ever recorded in 2022 and scientists have now revealed what caused it.
Just like on Earth, the surface of Mars sometimes vigorously shakes and unsurprisingly, that is called a marsquake. The largest ever marsquake recorded in history happened in 2022 and scientists now finally know the reason behind it.
A study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Tuesday rules out the possibility that the marsquake was caused by a meteor impact. The quake had a magnitude of 4.7 and since its seismic signal was similar to previous quakes that were caused by meteoroid impacts, scientists initially believed that it might have been caused by an impact as well. This launched an international search for a fresh crater at the time.
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Mars is smaller than Earth but it has around the same land surface area as our planet because it has no oceans. This huge amount of ground—about 144 million square kilometres—had to be surveyed. For that, the researchers sought contributions from the European Space Agency, (ESA) the Chinese National Space Agency, (CNSA) the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency.
This could be the first time that all missions in orbit around the red planet have collaborated on a single project, according to the University of Oxford.
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After months of comprehensively searching on the Martian surface, the researchers announced on Tuesday that no crater was found. They instead concluded that the marsquake was caused by the release of tectonic forces from within the planet’s interior. This could mean that Mars is more seismically active than we understand it to be.
“We still think that Mars doesn’t have any active plate tectonics today, so this event was likely caused by the release of stress within Mars’ crust. These stresses are the result of billions of years of evolution; including the cooling and shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates,” said Benjamin Fernando, who led the research, in a press statement. Fernando works at the Department of Physics at Oxford.
Space agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and technologists like Elon Musk have spoken of plans to send astronauts to Mars. With information from studies like this one, we might understand where it would be safe for humans to land on Mars and where it would be better to avoid a launch.
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First published on: 18-10-2023 at 16:02 IST
