Largest Marsquake Ever Recorded May Be InSight's Swan Song

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May 26, 2022

Dear Reader, This week's top story is about the swan song of NASA's Insight mission. The robotic lander is nearing the end of its life, but it's not going quietly. Earlier this month, despite plunging power levels due to dust caking its solar panels, InSight managed to discover and study the most powerful quake ever detected beyond Earth. The 5.0-magnitude temblor may be close to the strongest seismic activity a world like Mars can produce, mission scientists say. What's certain, though, is that the feat is a fitting finale for the lander's lonely, groundbreaking sojourn on the Red Planet. Elsewhere this week, we have stories on a radical approach for imaging Earth-like exoplanets, new pathways for seeing a nigh-unobservable quantum phenomenon and more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Space Exploration Largest Marsquake Ever Recorded May Be InSight's Swan Song NASA's three-and-a-half-year mission to collect seismic data from Mars is running out of juice By Joanna Thompson

Astronomy Our Sun Could Someday Reveal the Surfaces of Alien Earths In the far future, we could reveal detailed views of distant worlds by turning our home star into a gravitational lens By Allison Gasparini

Space Exploration NASA Hails Starliner Launch Success despite Thruster Glitch The Starliner team is confident the malfunctions won't prevent the spacecraft from completing its mission By SPACE.com,Josh Dinner

Quantum Physics Physicists Find a Shortcut to Seeing an Elusive Quantum Glow Once considered practically unseeable, a phenomenon called the Unruh effect might soon be revealed in laboratory experiments By Joanna Thompson

Space Exploration Will NASA Save Europe's Beleaguered Mars Rover? Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended hopes of launching the ExoMars rover in 2022. Now the mission may never lift off at all By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Politics To Prevent Nuclear Annihilation, Resume Negotiations Immediately The war in Ukraine shows the urgency of nuclear arms control By The Editors

Paleontology How Mammals Conquered the World after the Asteroid Apocalypse They scurried in the shadows of dinosaurs for millions of years until a killer space rock created a new world of evolutionary opportunity By Steve Brusatte

Extraterrestrial Life Origin of Life Theory Involving RNA-Protein Hybrid Gets New Support A structure that links amino acids suggests that early organisms could have been based on an RNA-protein mix By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine

FROM THE STORE Extraterrestrials and the Search for Life Do aliens exist? The enduring mystery of whether we're alone in the universe is a question that continues to drive scientific study into groundbreaking directions. This collection examines the latest thinking in the search for life, from discussing why we haven't found evidence of aliens so far to determining where and how to conduct the search to opening up the possibilities for what otherworldly life could truly look like.

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Maybe we'll get a nice thick dust devil and we'll have enough power to keep going for a while. But we haven't seen too much of that yet." Ingrid Daubar, a Brown University planetary scientist and collaborator on NASA's ailing Insight Mars lander mission

FROM THE ARCHIVE InSight Lander Makes Best-Yet Maps of Martian Depths The NASA mission used seismic waves from marsquakes to perform a core-to-crust survey of the planet's subsurface By Jonathan O'Callaghan | July 2021

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