It’s a little odd.
From NASA’s JPL:
“InSight’s first readings carry on the science that began with NASA’s Apollo missions,” said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!”
The new seismic event was too small to provide solid data on the Martian interior, which is one of InSight’s main objectives. The Martian surface is extremely quiet, allowing SEIS, InSight’s specially designed seismometer, to pick up faint rumbles. In contrast, Earth’s surface is quivering constantly from seismic noise created by oceans and weather. An event of this size in Southern California would be lost among dozens of tiny crackles that occur every day.
Fascinating. Mars is a smaller planet than Earth, further from our common star, and thus in a weaker gravitational field. Its moons, Deimos & Phobos, are small, so it seems unlikely that the sound was gravitationally triggered. Would a meteorite strike cause that? I’d expect the wave form to have an abrupt beginning and a tail for an end, and that’s not what we see here.
Just a little settling of the planet?
Just a little windy, maybe, to be polite about it?
Image Source: NASA.
