seismic wave

If the lander does pick up the signal, it will tell scientists something about how fast seismic waves travel through the ground, a clue to the details of Mars’ interior structure.

In some cases, we get this picture by waiting for a natural event to produce the seismic waves.

Because the seismic waves from those quakes traveled deep through Earth’s mantle on their way to the seismometers, the recorded tremors contained clues about the location and movement of material far below the seafloor.

As a seismic wave oscillates through the ground, its high-frequency components lose energy faster than its low-energy components, said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist and volcanologist at Western Washington University.

Two components of seismic waves, P and S waves, move at different speeds.