- Title: AI reveals 'Marsquakes' go deeper than expected
- Date: 7th February 2025
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (February 5, 2025) (Reuters) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR CONSTANTINOS CHARALAMBOUS (pron. HaraLAMbus), PLANETARY SCIENTIST, IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON, SAYING: “What we are finding in our study is that the meteorites appear to be hitting Mars almost twice as often as we previously thought through other orbital imaging surveys. And there's definitely a lot of Marsquakes that are impacts in the catalog that we have detected with the InSight. And all of this will help us understand the interior structure of the planet. And because the interior structure is a time capsule and as the seismic waves probe through that time capsule, they can help us understand the origins, the formation and evolution and current state of the planet, and how other rocky planets may have been formed and evolved.” VARIOUS OF PIKE SHOWING A SILICON MICROSEISMOMETER DESIGNED AND BUILT BY IMPERIAL PIKE USING A SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE VARIOUS OF PIKE PUTTING A SILICON MICROSEISMOMETER (DESIGNED AND BUILT BY IMPERIAL FOR NASA AND THE SAME AS ON BOARD INSIGHT) INTO MICROSCOPE
- Embargoed: 21st February 2025 10:32
- Keywords: AI Imperial College London Insight Mars Marsquake Marsquakes NASA artificial intelligence meteroid
- Location: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK / IN SPACE / MARS / CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- City: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK / IN SPACE / MARS / CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- Country: UK
- Topics: Europe,Science,Space Exploration
- Reuters ID: LVA00E927606022025RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Bern have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover that many 'Marsquakes' are a result of seismic signals from meteoroid impacts reaching further and deeper into Mars than previously thought.
The findings, published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal, could help reveal more about the internal structure of Mars and how it and other rocky planets may have been formed and evolved.
A ‘Marsquake' refers to any seismic activity that shakes the ground on Mars, whether from tectonics, meteorite impacts or thermal stress, explained Imperial researcher Dr Constantinos Charalambous.
"Impacts cause Marsquakes through the seismic vibrations once the impact hits the surface of Mars, it radiates seismic waves," said Charalambous.
He added: "The seismic waves are able to take a faster path or a highway, let's say, through the deeper layers of the planet, the mantle."
The research team used AI to examine all meteoroid impacts near NASA's InSight lander from December 2018 to December 2022. The AI scanned tens of thousands of images captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to identify new impacts. The data was cross-referenced with seismic information collected by the InSight lander.
"You've got that large amount of data, more than actually a human can literally comprehend... This is where AI and machine learning, being able to mechanize a way that a human looks at it. So we take, if you like, the black box of the human brain and we translate that to the black box of AI," said Tom Pike, Professor of Micro-Engineering at Imperial, who help build the silicon microseismometers that enabled this seismic detection on Mars.
"Previously we were kind of seeing the planet in black and white. Now we're seeing it more in color. We're seeing it deeper. We've got a full spectrum of seismic signatures coming in. And this means that we can understand a lot more about the interior of another planet,” Pike added.
The data revealed that meteoroid impacts on Mars occur approximately twice as often as prior estimates suggested. Researchers previously believed that the energy from seismic events detected by InSight was confined to Mars' crust. However, the data indicates that seismic waves from some impacts can travel deeper, reaching the mantle and more distant regions of the planet.
The next step for the researchers is to reassess their models of Mars' interior composition and structure to explain how signals can reach such depths. They believe AI's rapid processing power and ability to accurately identify impacts will be instrumental in this new phase of research.
"The interior structure is a time capsule and as the seismic waves probe through that time capsule, they can help us understand the origins, the formation and evolution and current state of the planet, and how other rocky planets may have been formed and evolved,” said Charalambous.
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