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All right, the bulletin for this evening, we are going to Mars. This item is dated August 28th. NASA Marsquake Data Reveals a Lumpy Nature of Red Planet's Interior. This is from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Rocket material that impacted Mars lies scattered in giant lumps throughout the planet's mantle, offering clues about Mars' interior and its ancient past. What appear to be fragments from the aftermath of massive impacts on Mars that occurred 45 billion years ago have been detected deep below the planet's surface. The discovery was made thanks to NASA's now retired InSight lander, which recorded the findings before the mission's end in 2022. The ancient impacts released enough energy to melt continent-sized slough of the early crust and mantle into vast magma oceans, simultaneously injecting the impact of fragments and Martian debris deep into the planet's interior. There is no way to tell exactly what struck Mars. The early solar system was filled with a range of different rocky objects that could have done so, including some solars that they were effectively protoplanets. The remains of these impacts still exist in the form of lumps that are as large as 2.5 miles, or about 4 kilometers across, and scattered throughout the Martian mantle. They offer a record preserved only on worlds like Mars, whose lack of tectonic plates has kept its interior from being churned up the way Earth is through a process known as convection. The finding was reported Thursday, August 28th, in a study published by the journal Science. We've never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before, said the paper's lead author, Castantino Charalambos of Imperial College London. What we're seeing is a mantle studded with ancient fragments. Their survival to this day tells us Mars' mantle has evolved sluggishly over billions of years. On Earth, features like these may well have been largely erased. InSight, which was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, placed the first seismometer on Mars' surface in 2018. The first seismometer in 2018. The extremely sensitive instrument recorded 1,319 Marsquakes before the lander's end of mission in 2022. Quakes produce seismic waves that change as they pass through different kinds of material, providing scientists a way to study the interior of a planetary body. To date, the InSight team has measured the size, depth, and composition of Mars' crust, mantle and core. This latest discovery regarding the mantle's composition suggests how much is still waiting to be discovered within InSight's data. We knew Mars was a time capsule bearing records of its early formation, but we didn't anticipate just how clearly we'd be able to see with InSight, said Tom Pike of Imperial College London, co-author of the paper.
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