Nasa to use 'Marsquakes' in first ever mission to discover Red Planet's core

Scientists hope to use the data to better understand the formation of planets billions of years ago

Nasa has launched its first ever mission that is focused on investigating the interior of Mars.

The mission, called InSight will instal sensors on the surface of the Red Planet in order to detect what sorts of underground activity there is, and then compare that to the movements observed here on earth.

Scientists hope that tremors on Mars will reveal how the rock below the planet’s surface are layered, which could help with understanding how the planets formed 4.6 billion years ago.

“As seismic waves travel through [Mars] they pick up information along the way; as they travel through different rocks,” Dr Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator on InSight, told the BBC.

“And all those wiggles you see on seismograms — scientists understand how to pull that information out. After we’ve gotten many, many Marsquakes from different directions, we can put together a three dimensional view of the inside of Mars.”

The rocket carrying the Insight mission — Atlantis — will occur at 4.05am Pacific time Saturday, or 11.05am GMT. A forecast for fog may force a delay of the launch, however.

Nasa has attempted to send seismometers to Mars previously, in the 1970s, but the missions failed because the sensors were positioned on the body of the probes and were therefore unable to detect ground vibrations.

Scientists are not sure how many quakes they will be able to detect over the course of the year, but their estimates indicate they may see as many as a couple dozen.

They expect the quakes to be small — at around a Magnitude 3. That size of quake could be slept through by a person on earth.

Nasa expects Mars to have a metal core, a dense mantle, and a ligher crust, but they are not sure precisely where the boundaries of these layers will be found.

The seismometers are an international collaboration in a way, with the French providing broadband sensors that detect low-frequency vibrations on the ground, while the UK has provided a trio of micro seismometers, which will detect higher frequencies.