Earth Analog Seismic Deployment for InSight’s Mars seismic installation

Abstract:

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior. InSight’s main experiment is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), which will robotically place a broadband seismometer provided by the French Space Agency (CNES) on the Martian surface. SEIS will operate on the surface for a full Mars year.

Installing and operating a seismometer on Mars imposes constraints rarely considered in terrestrial seismic installations. The InSight project has therefore conducted a terrestrial analog field deployment exercise to better understand and prepare for the distinctive challenges that placing a broadband seismometer in a Mars-like configuration and environment would pose. The exercise was conducted in two phases at NASA’s Goldstone facility in the Southern California Mojave desert. In the first phase we have installed a surface geophysical station including a broadband seismometer, a microbarometer, anemometer, and thermal sensors in a configuration resembling the InSight’s geophysical station. The site was located in an exposed location with rough surface and subsurface terrain. It was in close proximity to Goldstone permanent seismic station (GSC) that provided a ground-truth measurement. In the second phase, the installation was moved to a dry lakebed where the geophysical conditions mimic the expected geophysical environment of InSight’s target landing site on Mars.

We will present a summary of lessons learned so far from our analog deployment exercise. The data analysis emphasizes several aspects of key importance to the InSight mission: (1) Exploring strategies to mitigate environmental noise sources; (2) Recognizing noise sources that might be introduced by the InSight lander (solar panel flutter); (3) Identifying weak geophysical signals with low SNR above the environmental noise; (4) Using non tectonic signals (such as dust devils, and mechanical sources) to determine the elastic properties of the shallow structure.