Where humanity first felt Mars shake.
The InSight Site lies on Elysium Planitia, a flat lava plain near the Martian equator chosen precisely because it was boringly smooth — the perfect place to sit still and listen. NASA's InSight lander touched down in 2018 and recorded the first-ever Marsquakes, detecting more than 1,300 of them before its mission ended.
Claim your plot here →Unlike rovers, InSight never moved — it was a geophysical station. Its ultra-sensitive seismometer let scientists 'hear' seismic waves ripple through the planet, and from them they mapped the size of Mars's core, mantle and crust for the first time, revealing a surprisingly large, liquid iron core.
InSight cataloged more than 1,300 marsquakes, including a magnitude-5 event in 2022, and even sensed the impacts of meteorites hitting elsewhere on the planet. As dust gradually smothered its solar panels, power dwindled and NASA declared the mission over in December 2022.
Its biggest marsquake, near magnitude 5, is modest by Earth standards but the largest ever measured on another planet.
InSight's seismometer was sensitive enough to detect ground motion smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom.