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Science|Quakes on Mars Reveal New Features of the Planet’s Interior
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/science/astronomy-geology-mars-quakes.html
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Using data from NASA’s retired InSight lander, two separate teams of researchers found evidence of a sluggish Martian mantle and a solid inner core.
Sept. 4, 2025, 4:45 p.m. ET
Three years ago, Martian dust shrouded the solar panels on NASA’s InSight lander, preventing further operations and leading to its retirement. But the mission’s data continues to reveal information about the red planet — particularly how it is both like, and unlike, our own.
In a new paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists announced that the innermost part of Mars’s core was not liquid but solid, just like Earth’s. Another paper, published last week in the journal Science by a different team, described the planet’s mantle as full of ancient debris, with a texture more like rocky road than smooth chocolate ice cream.
Together, the studies offer clues to Mars’s history, including what violent collisions it experienced in the past and how it lost its magnetic field. The knowledge could help scientists better understand other rocky worlds and identify the conditions necessary for habitability elsewhere in the galaxy.
“There are connections to our own planet, to how planets form in general and to how we understand different planets outside our solar system,” said Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University and former member of the InSight science team who was not involved in either study.
Earth’s early geological history is difficult to decipher because the crust is ever changing, a feature driven by active tectonic plates that continuously recycle material between the surface and the layer below it. Mars is different. Its crust is a single, stagnant lid protecting an interior that has been virtually frozen in time since its formation.
Listening to the tremors of quakes as they travel through Mars is a crucial technique for mapping its insides. A seismometer placed on the planet by the InSight lander, launched in 2018 by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recorded more than 1,300 quakes over the mission’s lifetime.
