Images from each and every spacecraft now orbiting Mars have ruled out a meteorite strike as the cause of a 4.7-magnitude marsquake, the strongest temblor ever detected beyond Earth
Bone-dry, bitterly cold and bathed in cosmic radiation, the surface of Mars may well be dead, with not so much as a single microbe breaking its state of barrenness. But just below its frozen exterior, the planet itself is alive with the sound of thunder. There is still warmth deep within, leftover from the world’s formation eons ago, and as that heat slowly escapes to space, the planet’s crust cools, contracts and quivers.
Almost as a swan song, the lander had recorded its biggest catch earlier that year—a 4.7-magnitude whopper dubbed S1222a, which was detected on May 4, 2022. This monster marsquake was as large as all the others that InSight detected combined—so strong, in fact, that scientists struggled to explain its origin. “When we first saw it, we were very uncertain,” says Mark Panning of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , project scientist on InSight.
The quake’s mysterious source, Fernando and his co-authors posit, lies perhaps 20 kilometers below the surface, stemming from faults and folds that form in the planet’s slowly shrinking crust. “The ground has cracks everywhere,” says Bruce Banerdt of JPL, principal investigator of InSight. “If they slide past each other, that’s called a fault, and the motion on a fault causes a quake.
Had the quake been caused by an impact, the incoming meteorite would likely have formed a crater hundreds of meters wide, with debris strewn for kilometers across the surrounding landscape. InSight detected meteorite impacts on at least two other occasions: one in September 2021 and another later that year on December 24.
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