{"id":48766,"date":"2025-09-07T07:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T07:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/48766\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T07:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T07:45:08","slug":"insight-mission-discovers-chaotic-structure-hidden-inside-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/48766\/","title":{"rendered":"InSight Mission Discovers Chaotic Structure Hidden Inside Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"Artist\u2019s<\/a>Illustration of ancient Mars being struck by a gigantic space rock, triggering massive melting and mixing deep inside the planet. Credit: Vadim Sadovski \/ Imperial College London<\/p>\n

New research shows that Mars\u2019 mantle holds evidence of its turbulent early history.<\/strong><\/p>\n

New research published in Science shows that Mars\u2019 mantle retains evidence of its violent origins.<\/p>\n

The planet\u2019s interior is not the smooth, uniform structure often shown in textbook diagrams. Instead, scientists found it to be irregular and fragmented, resembling a Rocky Road brownie more than the neatly layered slice of a millionaire\u2019s shortbread.<\/p>\n

We usually imagine rocky planets like Earth and Mars as having clean, stratified interiors, with crust, mantle, and core stacked like distinct layers of dessert. But in the case of Mars, the structure is far more chaotic.<\/p>\n

Data from seismic waves recorded by NASA\u2019s InSight mission revealed subtle irregularities that pointed to this complexity. Researchers from Imperial College London and collaborating institutions determined that Mars\u2019 mantle contains ancient blocks as large as 4 kilometers across. These preserved fragments act as geological fossils, offering a direct record of the violent events that shaped the planet in its earliest history.<\/p>\n

\"Rocky<\/a>Rocky Road brownie (left) contains chunks below its crust, whereas millionaire\u2019s shortbread (right) has smooth layers. Credit: Imperial College London
\nHistory of gigantic impacts<\/p>\n

Mars, along with the other rocky planets, formed about 4.5 billion years ago as dust and rock around the young Sun gradually clumped together under gravity.<\/p>\n

After its initial formation, Mars was battered by massive, planet-scale collisions\u2014events similar to the one believed to have created Earth\u2019s Moon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese colossal impacts unleashed enough energy to melt large parts of the young planet into vast magma oceans,\u201d said lead researcher Dr Constantinos Charalambous from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. \u201cAs those magma oceans cooled and crystallised, they left behind compositionally distinct chunks of material \u2013 and we believe it\u2019s these we\u2019re now detecting deep inside Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

These colossal impacts and their aftermath shattered and stirred fragments of Mars\u2019 early crust and mantle, possibly blending in debris from the colliding bodies, before folding them into the planet\u2019s molten interior. As the planet gradually cooled, these chemically varied pieces became locked within a sluggish, unevenly convecting mantle, resembling ingredients suspended in a Rocky Road brownie mixture rather than being blended into a smooth whole.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/a>Illustration of NASA\u2019s InSight lander on Mars with a cutaway of the shallow subsurface below. Credit: IPGP\/Nicolas Sarter<\/p>\n

In contrast to Earth, where plate tectonics continually reshuffle and recycle crust and mantle material, Mars developed a rigid outer shell early on. This stagnant crust prevented further large-scale mixing, leaving its interior preserved as a geological time capsule.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of this chaos likely unfolded in Mars\u2019s first 100 million years,\u201d says Dr Charalambous. \u201cThe fact that we can still detect its traces after four and a half billion years shows just how sluggishly Mars\u2019s interior has been churning ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listening into Mars<\/p>\n

The evidence comes from seismic data recorded by NASA\u2019s InSight lander \u2013 in particular, eight especially clear marsquakes, including two triggered by two recent meteorite impacts that left 150-metre-wide craters in Mars\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

InSight picks up seismic waves travelling through the mantle and the scientists could see that waves of higher frequencies took longer to reach its sensors from the impact site. These signs of interference, they say, shows that the interior is chunky rather than smooth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese signals showed clear signs of interference as they travelled through Mars\u2019s deep interior,\u201d said Dr Charalambous. \u201cThat\u2019s consistent with a mantle full of structures of different compositional origins \u2013 leftovers from Mars\u2019s early days.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened on Mars is that, after those early events, the surface solidified into a stagnant lid,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt sealed off the mantle beneath, locking in those ancient chaotic features \u2014 like a planetary time capsule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike the interior of Earth<\/p>\n

Earth\u2019s crust, by comparison, is always slowly shifting and recycling material from the surface into our planet\u2019s mantle \u2013 at tectonic plates such as the Cascadia subduction zone where some of the plates forming the Pacific Ocean floor are pushed under the North American continental plate.<\/p>\n

The chunks detected in Mars\u2019s mantle follow a striking pattern, with a few large fragments \u2013 up to 4 km wide \u2013 surrounded by many smaller ones.<\/p>\n

Professor Tom Pike, who worked with Dr Charalambous to unravel what caused these chunks, said: \u201cWhat we are seeing is a \u2019fractal\u2019 distribution, which happens when the energy from a cataclysmic collision overwhelms the strength of an object. You see the same effect when a glass falls onto a tiled floor as when a meteorite collides with a planet: it breaks into a few big shards and a large number of smaller pieces. It\u2019s remarkable that we can still detect this distribution today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The finding could have implications for our understanding of how the other rocky planets \u2013 like Venus and Mercury \u2013 evolved over billions of years. This new discovery of Mars\u2019s preserved interior offers a rare glimpse into what might lie hidden beneath the surface of stagnant worlds.<\/p>\n

\u201cInSight\u2019s data continues to reshape how we think about the formation of rocky planets, and Mars in particular,\u201d said Dr Mark Panning of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. JPL led the InSight mission before its end in 2022. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to see scientists making new discoveries with the quakes we detected!\u201d<\/p>\n

Reference: \u201cSeismic evidence for a highly heterogeneous martian mantle\u201d by Constantinos Charalambous, W. Thomas Pike, Doyeon Kim, Henri Samuel, Benjamin Fernando, Carys Bill, Philippe Lognonn\u00e9 and W. Bruce Banerdt, 28 August 2025, Science.
DOI: 10.1126\/science.adk4292<\/a><\/p>\n

Funding: UK Space Agency, UK Space Agency, Johns Hopkins University, NASA InSight mission, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ANR, CNES, IdEx Universit\u00e9 Paris Cit\u00e9, CINES<\/p>\n

Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration of ancient Mars being struck by a gigantic space rock, triggering massive melting and mixing deep inside…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[18,19,31904,17,1203,36106,28709,133,451],"class_list":{"0":"post-48766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-imperial-college-london","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-mars","13":"tag-nasa-insight-lander","14":"tag-planet-formation","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-space"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}