Results From the Insight Mission After a Year and a Half on Mars
- 1Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom (w.t.pike@imperial.ac.uk)
- 2Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States
- 3Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Université de Paris, Paris, France
- 4Institute of Geophysics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 5Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
- 6Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussles, Belgium
- 7Planetary Science Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- 8Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California, United States
- 9Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique/Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
- 10DLR Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, Germany
The InSight mission landed on Mars in November of 2018 and completed installation of a seismometer (SEIS) on the surface about two months later. In addition to SEIS, InSight carries a diverse geophysical observatory including a heat flow and sub-surface physical properties experiment (HP3), a geodesy (planetary rotation dynamics) experiment (RISE), and a suite of environmental sensors measuring the magnetic field and atmospheric temperature, pressure and wind (APSS). For more than a year, SEIS has been providing near-continuous seismic monitoring of Mars, with background noise levels orders of magnitude lower than that achievable on the Earth. Since installation was completed, the SEIS team has identified more than 400 events that we have not attributed to the local environment or spacecraft activity, and dozens that appear to be marsquakes of tectonic origin. We present an overview of observations by the SEIS instrument as well as a summary of other geophysical observations made by InSight during the past year and a half.
How to cite: Pike, W. T., Banerdt, W., Smrekar, S., Lognonné, P., Giardini, D., Banfield, D., Dehant, V., Folkner, W., Golombek, M., Johnson, C., Russell, C., Spiga, A., and Spohn, T.: Results From the Insight Mission After a Year and a Half on Mars, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22031, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22031, 2020.
