The largest recorded earthquake on Mars InSight Lander made a big discovery before its end

The most powerful earthquake ever recorded on Mars. The InSight Mars Lander of the US space agency NASA has detected this earthquake, which was at least 5 times more powerful than the largest earthquake recorded last time. Its intensity was 4.7. In early August 2021, there was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake on this planet. This discovery may be one of the latest discoveries from the InSight lander. Dust storms on Mars have covered InSight’s solar arrays. In their recent tweet, NASA said that the power of the Insight Lander has actually been reduced. Sharing an image, the agency has said that this may be the last image from Insight Lander.

The earthquake that has been detected occurred on the night of May 4 of this year. It has been described as the strongest earthquake ever to occur on Mars, the intensity of which was measured at 4.7. According to a study published December 14 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, this earthquake was recorded in the tectonically active Cerberus Fossae region.

My power is really low so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though – my time here has been productive and serene. If I can continue to talk to my mission team, I will, but I’ll close here soon. Thanks for staying with me. pic.twitter.com/wkYKww15kQ

— NASA Vision (@NASAInSight) December 19, 2022

You might be thinking that a magnitude 4.7 earthquake is normal, but it’s not. According to scientists, an earthquake of about 5 magnitude is normal for the earth, because every year 5 lakh such earthquakes occur on the earth. But Mars is tectonically much calmer and magnitude 5 is pretty high there. The recorded earthquake waves now lasted about 10 hours, 10 times longer than before. Scientists have said that to date, the InSight lander has not recorded such a large earthquake on Mars.

Insight Lander has been active on Mars since 2018. It is collecting a lot of information about Mars. Scientists installed the seismometer on Mars in December 2018. Since then it has been recording large earthquakes on Mars. The InSight lander has detected more than 1,313 earthquakes in 1,300 days on Mars. The main mission of the lander officially ended in the year 2020, but NASA is still continuing this mission. However, many kinds of problems are coming to operate it.