First 'Marsquake' Detected on Red Planet

There are earthquakes and moonquakes, and now a NASA spacecraft has detected what's believed to be a 'marsquake' on the Red Planet. From a report: The spacecraft picked up the faint trembling of Mars's surface on 6 April, 128 days after landing on the planet last November. The quake is the first to be detected on a planetary body other than Earth or Moon. The shaking was relatively weak, the French space agency CNES said on 23 April. The seismic energy it produced was similar to that of the moonquakes that Apollo astronauts measured in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 'We thought Mars was probably going to be somewhere between Earth and the Moon' in terms of seismic activity, says Renee Weber, a planetary scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. 'It's still very early in the mission, but it's looking a bit more Moon-like than Earth-like,' she says. It's not yet clear whether the shaking originated within Mars or was caused by a meteorite crashing into the planet's surface.

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