What is Mars Core made of ?

Mars is the best-studied planet after our planet Earth, but its interior remains unknown to a larger extent because seismological observations have not been performed yet. Geodesy's research indicated that the core of Mars is certainly liquid. Now we have more information because the Earth-based experiments performed on Iron Sulphur alloys thought to comprise the core of Mars reveals details about seismic properties of Mars for the very first time. The InSight mission is in progress and has provided a lot of information about Mars.

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and our closest terrestrial neighbor still very far away from us. It is the most closest approach to Earth is 55 million kilometers and the farthest approach is around 400 million kilometers. It is extremely difficult to get to Mars and still if we manage to visit there, it is very dangerous. So it is good to investigate Red Planet through simulations rather than sending any space probes and perhaps humans.

What Research Team is saying?

• NASA’s Insight probe is already on Mars collecting seismic readings.

• Even with the seismic data there was an important missing piece of information without which the data could not be interpreted. We needed to know the seismic properties of the iron-sulfur alloy thought to make up the core of Mars.

• Due to technical hurdles, it took more than three years before we could collect the ultrasonic data we needed, so I am very pleased we now have it.

• The sample is extremely small, which might surprise some people given the huge scale of the planet we are effectively simulating. But microscale high-pressure experiments help exploration of macroscale structures and long time-scale evolutionary histories of planets.

• Taking our results, researchers reading Martian seismic data will now be able to tell whether the core is a primarily iron-sulfur alloy or not.

• If it isn’t, that will tell us something of Mars’ origins. For example, if Mars’ core includes silicon and oxygen, it suggests that, like the Earth, Mars suffered a huge impact event as it formed. So, what is Mars made of and how was it formed? I think we are about to find out.

These are some points which Nishida wrote on the Research Papers.

The End Notes

I will keep you updated with this ongoing Research. You can read the Reference Research Notes here. That's all in this article.

Cheers!