Mysterious magnetic pulses discovered on Mars

[Michael]

Mysterious magnetic pulses discovered on Mars

Perhaps even more puzzling, InSight also found that the crustal magnetic field near its location jiggled about every now and then. This wobbling is known as a magnetic pulsation, explains Matthew Fillingim, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the InSight science team.

These pulses are fluctuations in the strength or direction of the magnetic field, and they are not entirely unusual. Plenty of them happen on Earth and Mars triggered by upper atmospheric chaos, the action of the solar wind, and kinks in the planets’ magnetic bubbles, among other things.

Kinks in "magnetic bubbles"? More likely the pulses are related to slight variations in the current flow patterns into and through the planet. The timing is probably related to the fact that this part of the surface is pointed away from the sun.