UBC researcher to study earthquakes on Mars
VANCOUVER — University of British Columbia geophysicist Catherine Johnson has been waiting more than a decade to launch a robotic spacecraft that will study earthquake activity on Mars.
This spring, she will finally see years of her hard work set in motion.
Johnson, a professor at UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, is part of an international NASA team that will gather the first seismic information from any planet other than Earth. She is the only Canadian on that team.
The spacecraft, called the Insight Lander, was built in 2010. It was supposed to launch in 2016, but the vacuum seal on the equipment failed and the mission was delayed.
Johnson said everything is ready to go for a launch date of May 5.
The Insight Lander will take a much shorter time than the usual nine months to get to the Red Planet because Earth and Mars will be relatively close to each other. She said the team expects it to land on Nov. 26.
“I’m so excited,” Johnson said. “It really is one of the most thrilling things. No matter what we find, I know we’ll find things that we never imagined.
“We could discover information that could turn out to be important clues in the planet’s history, and to determine whether Mars is seismically active, which we are pretty sure it is.”
The Insight Lander will take photographs of the landscape in the area in which it lands, but it won’t rove around. “We need it to be very still,” she said. The equipment is to land a couple of hundred kilometres north of where the Curiosity Rover is currently located, near the equator.
The InSight Lander is equipped with a seismic instrument that can measure tiny ground movements. It also contains an instrument that will measure how much heat is flowing out of the planet.
Johnson and some of her students at UBC will help the NASA team analyze the lander’s data over a period of two Earth years (a Martian year takes 687 Earth days). The goal is to figure out where beneath the surface quakes are happening, how big they are, and determine the state of the planet’s core.
She said scientists don’t know the size of the planet’s core, or how much of it is molten, so they are hoping their research will also answer those questions. The data should also help scientists understand why Mars no longer has a magnetic field.