With one riddle solved, the team focused on another: how those lumps got there.<\/p>\n
Turning back the clock, they concluded that the lumps likely arrived as giant asteroids or other rocky material that struck Mars during the early solar system, generating those oceans of magma as they drove deep into the mantle, bringing with them fragments of crust and mantle.<\/p>\n
Charalambous likens the pattern to shattered glass \u2014 a few large shards with many smaller fragments. The pattern is consistent with a large release of energy that scattered many fragments of material throughout the mantle. It also fits well with current thinking that in the early solar system, asteroids and other planetary bodies regularly bombarded the young planets.<\/p>\n
On Earth, the crust and uppermost mantle is continuously recycled by plate tectonics pushing a plate\u2019s edge into the hot interior, where, through convection, hotter, less-dense material rises and cooler, denser material sinks. Mars, by contrast, lacks tectonic plates, and its interior circulates far more sluggishly. The fact that such fine structures are still visible today, Charalambous said, \u201ctells us Mars hasn\u2019t undergone the vigorous churning that would have smoothed out these lumps.\u201d<\/p>\n
And in that way, Mars could point to what may be lurking beneath the surface of other rocky planets that lack plate tectonics, including Venus and Mercury.<\/p>\n
More about InSight<\/p>\n
JPL managed InSight for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. InSight was part of NASA\u2019s Discovery Program, managed by the agency\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supported spacecraft operations for the mission.<\/p>\n
A number of European partners, including France\u2019s Centre National d\u2019\u00c9tudes Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), supported the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS<\/a>) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3<\/a>) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain\u2019s Centro de Astrobiolog\u00eda (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With one riddle solved, the team focused on another: how those lumps got there. Turning back the clock,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-117957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}