NASA has built a new website where it reports daily the meteorological conditions on the planet Mars.
NASA in the context of InSight Shipment made one new site for the weather of the planet Mars, where it will definitely be "fun for meteorologists". For other ordinary people like us, it's a daily reminder that the planet Mars, if not completely immaculate, is at least too cold.
The site reports daily weather reports giving temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind speed. The data collection comes from InSight, the NASA spacecraft currently near the red planet's equator.
For the average person, perhaps the most shocking aspect of the daily weather report is that the temperature regularly drops below -95 degrees Celsius and rarely exceeds -12 degrees Celsius. You may also notice that the planet is rather noisy, as the latest wind speed was recorded at 60 kilometers per hour (multiply the meters per second - m / s - by 3,6 to find kilometers per hour - Km / h) . And atmospheric pressure, usually around 700 Pascals, is significantly lower than on Earth, where the average atmospheric pressure at sea is greater than 100.000 Pascals. It is about 7 hPa when the equilibrium curves you see in the weather reports speak of around 1000 hPa.
But NASA does not care much about the weather as it uses these indications to get a better sense of seismic activity on Mars.
The InSight sensor package, called the Auxiliary Payload Subsystem (APSS), is used to detect sources of noise that could affect measurements by the Lander seismometer. APSS includes a magnetometer - the first to ever be placed on the surface of another planet - to read changes in the local magnetic field. It also includes sensors for measuring extreme changes in global temperature, measuring high winds and low atmospheric pressure.
And what NASA really wants to learn is if there's a seismic activity that could tell us more about how the Earth was formed.
