What’s shaking Mars?

Dr Anna Horleston will deliver the ESE Departmental Seminar on Thursday the 29th of February 2024: “What’s shaking Mars?”

Join us in room G41 – RSM Building – on Thursday 29th of February 2024 at 12h15.

Abstract

NASA’s InSight lander deployed the first seismic station to the surface of Mars in 2018. The dataset collected over the next four years took us on a journey of discovery – from tiny quakes close to the lander to quakes on the opposite side of the planet; meteorite impacts and dust devils; solar panel shaking and hammering. We saw it all! In this talk I’ll walk you through the highs and lows of the mission and the seismic dataset: from launch to final transmission through deployment of the seismometer, first quake detection, determination of the core size, meteorite detection, core composition, surface waves, the biggest quake observed, and the last quake recorded. We’ll discover how one seismometer expanded our understanding of the composition and evolution of the red planet, look at some amazing images, and explore what more we can do with the dataset.

About the speaker

Anna is a planetary seismologist at the University of Bristol. She’s had a varied career working across many Earth-based seismic disciplines from instrument management and deployment (all over the world) with SEIS-UK to baseline monitoring of UK fracking sites as well as a stint in industry doing near-surface geophysical surveys. Since 2018 she has been working as part of the InSight science team and as a member of the Marsquake Service, which she co-led from early 2020 onwards. At the end of March, she will start a UK Space Agency Fellowship to continue exploiting the InSight dataset.