Seismology has been a long-overlooked tool in planetary exploration, but the success of NASA’s InSight lander has reignited the field
Seismic Missions , 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 Seismic Missions and collectively, they gave what remains the best-yet view of our sister satellite’s underworld. Yet despite this initial success and a few subsequent ill-fated attempts by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, interplanetary seismology remained on the sidelines of space exploration for the rest of the 20th century. Now, however, it’s getting a makeover for the new millennium. In 2018 NASA’s InSight mission carried a seismometer to Mars. Its fresh data has transformed this research area from a fringe pursuit to a vibrant, established subfield of planetary science. New seismometers are currently being developed for deployment across the solar system, from our moon to the far-flung icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn.
“This has the potential to be the beginning of a new golden age” in which scientists will peel back the layers on moons and planets alike to glimpse their hidden innards, says Mark Panning, a planetary seismologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Earth is, relatively speaking, a very active planet of shifting, sliding tectonic plates, erupting volcanoes and crust-shattering quakes. These powerful events produce seismic waves, which reverberate through our planet’s interior. Seismometers can track these seismic waves to reveal their propagation, intensity and sources. These instruments routinely record seismic waves traversing Earth’s crust and mantle and even bouncing off our planet’s core, yielding otherwise-unobtainable information about the subsurface. “This has the potential to be the beginning of a new golden age” in which scientists will peel back the layers on moons and planets alike to glimpse their hidden innards, says Mark Panning, a planetary seismologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Earth is, relatively speaking, a very active planet of shifting, sliding tectonic plates, erupting volcanoes and crust-shattering quakes. These powerful events produce seismic waves, which reverberate through our planet’s interior. Seismometers can track these seismic waves to reveal their propagation, intensity and sources. These instruments routinely record seismic waves traversing Earth’s crust and mantle and even bouncing off our planet’s core, yielding otherwise-unobtainable information about the subsurface. After Apollo, the hoped-for next giant leap in interplanetary seismology simply fizzled out. NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 landers both carried seismometers when they touched down on Mars in 1976. Sadly, neither lander’s kit delivered solid results: Viking 1’s failed entirely, and the results from Viking 2 were inconclusive. “The seismometer was on top of the lander, and it wasn’t protected from the wind,” Marusiak says. Later, in 1982, seismometers on the Soviet Union’s Venera 13 and 14 landers detected hints of volcanic tremors on Venus. But those landers were very short-lived, each barely surviving for about two hours and one hour, respectively, before succumbing to the planet’s harsh surface conditions.
Source: This news is originally published by scientificamerican