Page 17 - EngineerIT July 2022

SPACE SCIENCES

More than Mars quakes:

Insight yielded magnetism and

weather discoveries

By Ilima Loomis, science writer

A secondary suite of instruments on the Mars lander produced a first look at
magnetic fields from the planet’s surface.

hen NASA announced in May “We’ve been waiting forever to get a magnetometer on the surface of Mars,”
that the InSight Mars lander said Rob Lillis, associate director of planetary science at the University of California,
Wwas shutting down after a Berkeley. “So these results have been really impactful.”
four year mission studying the planet’s
crust, mantle and core, headlines First look at magnetism from the surface
focused on the robot’s landmark The magnetometer is part of InSight’s auxiliary payload sensor suite. This group of
discoveries about seismic instruments, which also includes sensors measuring wind, temperature and pressure,
activity and mars quakes. was originally intended to monitor and measure conditions that could affect the
But although they’ve We’ve been lander’s seismic readings.
received less attention, waiting forever to “Their primary purpose was basically to be a support suite for the
a secondary set of get a magnetometer on seismometer,” said Catherine Johnson, co-investigator on the InSight science
observations is also the surface of Mars. So team and a professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric
leading to important Sciences at the University of British Columbia, who has been working with
discoveries about the these results have been the lander’s magnetism data.
red planet’s weather and really impactful. But even though the instruments were more limited than they would have
environment, including been on a mission entirely dedicated to those observations, they still offered
the first measurements of an unprecedented opportunity to gather data from the planet’s surface, she said.
magnetism taken from Mars’s surface. Scientists could create a more complete picture of the overall weather patterns around

After 1,211 Martian days, NASA’s InSight Mars lander took this final selfie on 24 April 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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