This image made available by NASA shows the planet Mars. This composite photo was created from over 100 images of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s. In our solar system family, Mars is Earth’s next-of-kin, the next-door relative that has captivated humans for millennia. The attraction is sure to grow on Monday, Nov. 26 with the arrival of a NASA lander named InSight.
The first “Mars quake” has been detected, NASA announced Tuesday.
The finding “officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!,” said Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA said this is the first trembling that appears to have come from inside the planet, as opposed to being caused by forces above the surface, such as wind.
The sound was detected by NASA’s Insight Lander, a robot spacecraft that’s now prowling around the Martian surface. The sound was detected on April 6, 2019.
Three distinct kinds of sounds can be heard, all of them detected as ground vibrations by the spacecraft’s seismometer: noise from Martian wind, the quake itself, and the spacecraft’s robotic arm as it moves to take pictures.
InSight heard the “marsquake” using a French-built instrument that contains three extremely sensitive seismometers nestled inside a dome to protect them from the wind, Nature magazine said.
“We’ve been waiting months for a signal like this,” said French seismologist Philippe Lognonné. ““It’s so exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still seismically active.
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Science magazine reported that the quake is so tiny that it would never be detected on Earth amid the background sounds of waves and wind.
As InSight’s 2-year mission continues, larger quakes will likely be discovered, Lognonné said. “We’re starting to have many small quakes,” he said. By the end of the mission, he told Science, “we’ll have a super big quake.”
This is not the first quake detected away from Earth: NASA’s Apollo astronauts installed five seismometers that measured thousands of quakes while operating on the Moon between 1969 and 1977.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Otherworldly: Sounds of first ‘Mars quake’ detected