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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

From the pages of WIRED [wired.com], more or less unfortunately.

This week, scientists are dropping an Olympus Mons of findings from the two brave robots. In three papers published today in the journal Science—each authored by dozens of scientists from around the world—researchers detail the clever ways they used InSight’s seismometer to peer deep into the Red Planet, giving them an unprecedented understanding of its crust, mantle, and core. It’s the first time scientists have mapped the interior of a planet other than Earth. And yesterday, another group of scientists held a press conference to announce early research results from Perseverance, and the next steps the rover will take to explore the surface of Jezero Crater, once a lake that could have been home to ancient microbial life.

Of course, it is the marsotectonic stuff we are all interested in.

The researchers reckon that the crust is made of two or three layers. There’s a topmost layer that’s 10 kilometers thick, which InSight’s measurements revealed to be unexpectedly light, perhaps because it’s made of fractured rock left over from meteorite impacts. The layer below that goes down to about 20 kilometers. “Unfortunately, we are not sure what follows next, if it’s already the mantle or if we have a third layer in the crust. There’s some ambiguities that we haven’t resolved,” says Knapmeyer-Endrun. “We can definitely say that the crust is not as thick as has been predicted previously, and it has a lower density.”

Planetary seismologist Simon Stähler of ETH Zürich led the effort to characterize the hottest and innermost chunk of Mars’ interior—its core. Though they lack the ability to actually see inside the planetary center, Stähler’s team was able to extract some information just by analyzing the S-waves that bounce off the core-mantle boundary. These rumblings, unable to penetrate the liquid core, find their way back up to the Martian surface, where they are picked up by InSight’s receivers. “It takes a good 10 minutes,” Stähler says, from the time of the quake to the detection of the signal reflected by the core. By measuring this interval, his team was able to deduce how deep into the planet the waves are traveling, thus measuring the depth of the core itself: around 1,550 kilometers from the surface.

And,

Previous estimates of the core’s radius using geochemical and geophysical data hinted at the absence of a lower mantle, but scientists needed InSight’s seismological readings to confirm it. Without this layer, the Martian core likely cooled much more readily than Earth’s. This is key to understanding the evolution of the Red Planet, and in particular why it lost its magnetic field, a barrier that would have protected the atmosphere—and potential life—from harsh solar winds. Creating a magnetic field requires a temperature gradient between the outer and inner core, high enough to create circulating currents that churn the core’s liquid and give rise to a magnetic field. But the core cooled so fast that these convection currents died out.

So, terraforming begins with a core? This may be harder than the Mars Society thinks!

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