8 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2020
QUANT UM GR AVIT Y
Not far from Mars’ equator,
a series of strange fissures rip
deep into the Red Planet’s surface.
The cracks of Cerberus Fossae run for
hundreds of miles, cutting through
craters, hills, and everything else in
their path. Relatively young-looking
volcanoes nearby, combined with trails
of tumbling rocks, have long fueled
speculation over whether the region is
still active today.
There’s no need to wonder any-
more. In a series of papers published
February 24 in the journals Nature
Geoscience and Nature Communications,
scientists released the first 10 months ofdiscoveries from NASA’s Mars InSight
lander. The findings include results from
the first seven months of seismic studies,
which solve the mystery of Cerberus
Fossae: The Red Planet is geologically
active and bustling with marsquakes.
InSight carries the first working seis-
mometer to investigate the Red Planet’s
surface since 1978. It’s also deployed
the first magnetometer on Mars. And
while the lander’s lack of wheels might
bring fewer news headlines than rovers
like Curiosity, astronomers say InSight’s
findings will ultimately help them better
understand the geological processes that
have shaped our neighboring world.MARS IS ALIVE
Last year, InSight’s instruments
detected two particularly strong seismic
jolts that researchers were ultimately
able to trace back to the main sur-
face fault associated with Cerberus
Fossae, which sits roughly 1,000 miles
(1,600 kilometers) from the lander’s
location. Each event measured magni-
tude 3.6 on the Richter scale.
“For the first time, we’ve established
that Mars is a seismically active planet,”
InSight Principal Investigator Bruce
Banerdt said during a media briefing.
“And the seismic activity is greater than
that of the Moon.”INSIGHT DETECTS MARSQUAKES,
PROVING SEISMIC ACTIVITY
NASA’s new seismometer on Mars detected
174 quakes in just seven months.
SHAKE, SHAKE, SHAKE. This view of Cerberus
Fossae, created using stereo data collected by
the European Space Agency’s Mars Express
spacecraft, shows fault cracks cutting across
the Red Planet. New data released from
NASA’s InSight lander show this region is
seismically active today. ESA/DLR/FU BERLIN