The team used instruments on board NASA's InSight probe, which landed in the flat Elysium Planitia in 2018 to study weak "marsquakes" rippling through the planet.

A new technique developed and finetuned on Earth now for the first time enabled a team led by Swiss geophysicists to use the lander's instruments to peek directly underneath the planet's parched surface and discover what lies within the first 660 feet (200 meters) of its crust.

"We used a technique that was developed here on Earth to characterize places for earthquake risk and to study the subsurface structure," Cedric Schmelzbach, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), and corresponding author of the new paper told Space.com.

Related: NASA's InSight Mars lander 'hears' Martian wind, a cosmic first.

There is no ocean on the planet and Mars' atmosphere is much thinner, resulting in a weaker, more feeble wind.

On top of that, while on Earth geologists could use countless stations, on Mars, they only have one — the InSight lander. .

On top of the younger lava layer, just below the surface regolith, is an approximately 50-feet-thick (15 m) band of rocky material likely stirred up from the Martian surface by a past meteorite impact that then rained back down to the planet's surface.

— InSight Mars lander snaps dusty selfie on Red Planet (photo).

— Mars InSight in photos: NASA's mission to probe core of the Red Planet.

— Mars InSight photos: A timeline to landing on the Red Planet .

Earlier studies of the planet's core, mantle and crust based on InSight data have revealed surprising differences between Mars and Earth.

But then, Mars lost its protective magnetic field, which subsequently allowed the abrasive solar wind, the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun, to gradually strip the planet of its atmosphere, and Mars developed into the hostile world that it is today