The first results from NASA’s Mars InSight lander have arrived giving us the most complete picture of the conditions on another world.

On November 26th 2018 NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport or InSight lander touched down on the surface of Mars. From it’s landing site in the Elysium Planitia near the Red Planet’s equator the lander, comprised of a variety of state of the art measurement equipment, set about its mission to take the ‘vital signs’ of our neighbour planet. The ultimate goal; to understand the interior of Mars, how the planet formed, and the processes that have shaped its evolution, and how this relates to the Earth. Today, after nearly 10 months of operations the first results from InSight are revealed in a series of papers published across the Nature family of journals.

The InSight Lander on the surface of Mars ((NASA/JPL-Caltech))

“This is the first mission dedicated to studying the deep interior of Mars,” says W. Bruce Banerdt, Principal Investigator on the InSight Mission to Mars and author of a paper that summarises the new results. “We are using geophysical investigations of the interior of Mars to better understand the formation and evolution of the Earth and of habitability of rocky planets in general.”

Amongst the revelations contained within the papers is the detection of 20 ‘marsquakes’ of magnitude 3 to 4, and 174 further seismic events demonstrating evidence of volcanic and tectonic activity, which together reveal that the planet is moderately seismically active — somewhere between Earth and the Moon. The mission has also delivered a surprise in the form of the detection of a local magnetic field at the landing site that is ten times stronger than expected. Further results reveal details of Mars’ atmospheric phenomena, such as gravitational waves and infrasound.

The InSight lander’s position as it relates to previous Mars missions. (NASA/JPL-CalTech)

“The InSight mission goals are to learn about the interior of Mars. Doing this requires very sensitive geophysical equipment in one place and not moving,” explains Catherine Johnson, Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, the University of British Columbia, who with postdoc Anna Mittelholz mainly worked with data from the magnetometer on InSight. “The Apollo astronauts deployed seismometers on the Moon but InSight is the first mission to place a seismometer on the surface of another planet!”

Learning about Mars also has important consequences for our knowledge of how Earth and other rocky planets formed. It allows us to determine just how unique Earth is, if at all.

“Earth and Mars are two very similar planets, which took different paths through their geological history,” says Domenico Giardini, Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. “It is very important to understand where and why the planets diverged and why one planet went in another direction, and how far away we are from taking the same direction (no water on the surface, little atmosphere, no magnetic field).

“This detailed knowledge can only be gained on two planets in the solar system.”