{"id":125313,"date":"2021-07-22T16:22:17","date_gmt":"2021-07-22T23:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/nasa-finally-knows-what-is-beneath-the-surface-of-mars"},"modified":"2021-07-22T16:22:17","modified_gmt":"2021-07-22T23:22:17","slug":"nasa-finally-knows-what-is-beneath-the-surface-of-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/nasa-finally-knows-what-is-beneath-the-surface-of-mars","title":{"rendered":"NASA finally knows what is beneath the surface of Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that we recorded it confirmed that the core is liquid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

What you may not realize, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist Mark Panning tells Inverse, is that those diagrams \u201care cartoons and guesses,\u201d based on gravitational measurements. The only planet whose structure scientists actually understand in detail is Earth.<\/p>\n

We know the innards of Earth through seismology measurements \u2014 something that hasn\u2019t been available for other planets. This was true until just recently: According to a trio<\/a> of<\/a> papers<\/a> published Thursday in Science<\/em>, researchers can finally confirm Mars has a large liquid metal core.<\/p>\n

Panning is the JPL project scientist for the NASA InSight mission<\/a>, which landed a seismometer on the Red Planet in 2018 and has been recording Marsquakes<\/a> ever since. NASA\u2019s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was designed to reveal the inner structure of Mars through seismological and thermal readings taken from a landing site on Elysium Planitia, a plain along the Martian equator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe fact that we recorded it confirmed that the core is liquid.\u201d What you may not realize, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist Mark Panning tells Inverse, is that those diagrams \u201care cartoons and guesses,\u201d based on gravitational measurements. The only planet whose structure scientists actually understand in detail is Earth. We know the innards of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}