Seismology has been a long-overlooked tool in planetary exploration, but the success of NASA’s InSight lander has reignited the field
Besides their successful landing on the moon, the astronauts of Apollo 11 made another historic “first” in July 1969 when Buzz Aldrin radioed a message back to Earth: “Houston, the passive seismometer has been deployed manually.” That seismic experiment was the first ever set on the lunar surface. Several more would be placed during later Apollo missions, and collectively, they gave what remains the best-yet view of our sister satellite’s underworld.
These same sorts of observations can be used to look inside other worlds and see how their geological guts compare to our own. The Apollo missions did as much for the moon, discovering it was, like Earth, separated into layers, with a core, mantle and crust. “This showed that the moon is differentiated,” says Angela Marusiak, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey. “There is a core deep down, so we know the moon did, at one point, have magnetic protection.
But in 2018, when NASA’s InSight lander launched to Mars, everything changed. Following its landing later that year, a robotic arm deployed an extremely sensitive seismometer, which, in a nod to the failures of Viking 1 and 2, included a shield to protect against the Martian wind. The experiment was a runaway success. To date, InSight has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes, including a monster magnitude 5.0 quake earlier this year that mission scientists are still poring over.
Titan is thought to have layers of ice below its surface, as well as a global liquid-water ocean. If this buried ocean is in direct contact with underlying layers of silicate rock—something only a seismometer can readily reveal—it could have been fed nutrients that may have allowed life to arise. If Titan’s interior has a different arrangement, such as another layer of ice underneath the ocean, the prospects for life could dim.
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