InSight Mission Updates (Post Landing)

[catdlr]

Aug 13, 2024
For its first billion or so years, Mars was partly covered in water, as dry ocean basins and riverbeds on its surface now attest. But three billion years ago the planet lost its magnetic field, possibly due to a cooling of its core, allowing the solar wind to strip away its atmosphere. This, so the thinking went, caused the water to evaporate into space.

However, according to a new study, it appears that the water may still be there, trapped in the pores of volcanic rock.

[deadman1204]

It would be fascinating to see what we could learn studying 10-20km deep aquifers on earth much less mars. To date, the deepest hole ever dug was about 12km, and that was a huge state led effort, not just a little university team or whatnot.
We know theres deep life on earth that measures its lifespan in centuries. They metabolize super slowly because of the very small gradients. Could something also exist on mars? I'm skeptical for a number of reasons, but its a fun thought.

[Blackstar]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-marsquake-data-reveals-lumpy-nature-of-red-planets-interior/

NASA Marsquake Data Reveals Lumpy Nature of Red Planet’s Interior
Aug. 28, 2025
Scientists believe giant impacts — like the one depicted in this artist’s concept — occurred on Mars 4.5 billion years ago, injecting debris from the impact deep into the planet’s mantle.

Scientists believe giant impacts — like the one depicted in this artist’s concept — occurred on Mars 4.5 billion years ago, injecting debris from the impact deep into the planet’s mantle. NASA’s InSight lander detected this debris before the mission’s end in 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Full Image Details

Rocky 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 4.5 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-size swaths of the early crust and mantle into vast magma oceans, simultaneously injecting the impactor fragments and Martian debris deep into the planet’s interior.

There’s 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 so large they were effectively protoplanets. The remains of these impacts still exist in the form of lumps that are as large as 2.5 miles (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’s is through a process known as convection.

The finding was reported Thursday, Aug. 28, in a study published by the journal Science.

[Dalhousie]

I'm a little bit sceptical that these are actual fragments, as opposed to anomalous density zones resulting from impact (or perhaps other processes)