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What’s strange is that these Martian wobbles happen at local midnight, as if responding to the demands of an unseen, nocturnal timer.

PIF: Correct. That’s when Mars’ gravity wave generator is pointed towards its long vanished target, gone nearly a billion years now. See 41

But the "midnight" repeatedly mentioned in this article is always referring to local midnight - i.e., when it is midnight at the longitude of InSight.

There is nothing "special" about that particular landing site nor about its local midnight - InSight could just as easily landed at any other longitude; it would then have still registered this phenomenon (your "gravity wave generator") at its (other) local midnight.

Thus, this phenomenon could be better described as constantly occurring at that side of Mars momentarily opposite to / farthest from the Sun. Which also means that your "gravity wave generator" is not pointing at any fixed target, since Mars revolves around the Sun once every Martian year (approx. 1.88 Earth years).

Think: Welding a machine gun to a Merry-Go-Round, facing outwards, and then setting the Merry-Go-Round into motion.

Even if your "gravity wave generator" were restricted only to InSight's lcoation, it still holds that Mars is constantly revolving around the Sun, and so that local, InSight-specific "gravity wave generator" would be pointing to a different direction of the Martian sky every midnight.

Regards,

It took me all of 2 minutes to come up with the idea, type and post it. It was a joke idea, not meant to be taken seriously.

Going further: what is now going on with this Martian mystery is not relatable to what it was a billion years ago - we only see the remnants, the ghost. Inferring conclusions based on present-day data will always be wrong and misleading.

A billion years ago the solar system was very likely a totally different place than it is now. We have learned that the current solar system is an anomaly to all other systems discovered to date. Most other systems seem to have the gas giants close to the star, with large earth-sized moons. This arrangement is in keeping with the electric universe theory.

What happened to our solar system to cause the disparity we live in today? Some great war? Some experiment gone horribly wrong? Something that caused both the Moon and Mars to have two distinct surface boundaries - one heavily pitted with craters and the other relatively smooth?

Science data without imagination is just dull.