NASA is doing its utmost to learn everything it can about Mars, and after sending three rovers, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, to roll around and scout out the surface, NASA sent up a stationary lander, InSight, which landed in November 2018.
One of the key tools on board InSight was a seismometer to pick up movement in the Red Planet’s surface, and the result has been pretty weird.
Mars doesn’t have quakes like Earth does.
That’s because Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates like Earth does. However, it does still have quakes — they’re just caused by cooling and contraction rather than tectonic movement.
Examining those quakes with a seismometer can help give us an idea of what the interior of the planet looks like and how it was formed.
In the process of examining the marsquakes, NASA’s researchers have found a few significant differences, as you would expect.
For one thing, they last longer than earthquakes. Due to the planet’s abundance of craters, quakes last for about a minute, while on Earth, quakes generally last a matter of seconds.
Marsquakes also sound much different from earthquakes.
NASA’s researchers think InSight has detected 21 quakes since April.
The rumblings of a marsquake occur at a range below human hearing. However, NASA cleaned up two recordings of marsquakes and processed them so we can hear them.
They released the recordings on SoundCloud , and they don’t sound much like the quakes that we’re used to, but more like cabin noise on an airplane.
However, it’s hard to tell for sure what is and isn’t a marsquake because the seismometer is an understandably sensitive device, and it picks up all kinds of weird noises.
It can pick up quakes, for sure, but it also picks up wind gusts that tend to move at 10 to 20 mph, but can gust at up to 70 mph during a dust storm.
Because Mars is windier during daylight hours, the NASA team tends to listen for quakes at night.
Weirdly, the seismometer can also pick up noises from the instruments themselves heating and cooling, which NASA likened to a car engine’s ticks as it cools down.
The other major noise to filter out is the sound of the lander’s arm every time it moves. The result is a lot of “dinks and donks,” and given that they’re coming from the surface of another planet, it’s all as fascinating as it is spooky.
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Check out some of the noises NASA has been hearing from Mars below.
h/t: NASA
