Marsquakes offer detailed look at red planet’s interior

A quake-measuring device on Mars is providing the first detailed look at the red planet’s interior, revealing a surprisingly thin crust and a hot molten core beneath the frigid surface.

In a series of articles published this week, scientists reported that the Martian crust is within the thickness range of Earth’s. The Martian mantle between the crust and core is roughly half as thick as Earth’s. And the Martian core is on the high side of what scientists anticipated, although smaller than the core of our own nearly twice-as-big planet.