Friday, October 7, 2022

"When you don't know anything you find out people think you're a hero."-Bruce Banerdt


InSight is among the most exciting Mars missions, and though it's on it's last legs, it's also not done. It's actually hard to find definitive stuff. I swear I read a paper one day only to find it redacted or lost the next. Neither surprises me anymore. Twenty new Mars-ish articles come out every day and most of them are hot garbage. 

Bruce Banerdt is the PI of InSight, and even he seems to be playing it close to the chest. This LPI is nearly three years old and still is the last LPI Mars lecture, meaning there is probably still a lot of back-office debate. However certain things have become clear. 

  • At 26:60 The largest Marsquakes may not be able to differentiate from highway and ocean noise on Earth.
  • At 27:50, Marsquakes resemble Moonquakes, not Earthquakes, implying the cooling and lithospheric thickness and differentiation are more Lunar and less Terran. 
  • Q&A after 40:30. 
Most likely InSight data are neither confirmed nor fully redacted. It's likely a case of seeing a lot of what was unexpected or unpreferred, therefore big evidence is needed and still being worked on. One thing that is pretty well established though is that S-Waves are missing, probably due to porosity of the upper crust. This means a lot, but must be considered suspect until another lecture comes out, simply because articles and papers seem to conflict, or offer information that would situationally conflict until specified. 

It gets weirder. The crust is still ambiguous, partly for the lack of S-waves, and the mantle is as well. It seems the whole mantle may be solid, or there's a thin outer mantle that's a little squishy. Sometimes the terminology is clearly talking about surface-waves, sometimes about shear-waves, either way the crust is consistently referred to as porous. 

This refers to Khan et al, which is (at least mostly) redacted. This is where the old articles were coming from, but the newer articles are not nearly so confident in their findings. That's probably for the best, but the end result is there's really not enough to stick ones neck out on. The best we can say is that the lithosphere appears to be layered with two or three strata. 

I found one more vid that I was hoping could constrain things a bit more. At 3:20 it starts talking about InSight, but again nothing really good. Note that it also refers to Khan et al even though it's younger than the redaction (which is probably a selective and contentious redaction anyway,) while the NASA articles talk about a broadly differentiated lithosphere of 37 km, Khan et al talks about a 500 km lithosphere out of a 6779 km planetary diameter. 

Cerberus Fossae had been focused and misrepresented to high-hell during InSight's mission, image at 12:25. Those are not volcanoes. They are, like Vallis Marianis, and the space in and around Alba Mons, unambiguous rifts. That is fascinating, Mars is cooling and undergoing thermal contraction, Rifts get wider, flatter, and more spacious, not smaller, so the mass-rifting of Mars is a huge mystery. Since Alba Mons in particular seems to be a tremendous Volcano, and a rift zone, that's maybe a good spot to land the next seismometer, and I suspect another, or several, will be needed at this point.

The bottom line seems to be InSight has raised more questions than it answered. At least so far. 




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