InSight mission Options

[Paolo]

the GEMS Discovery finalist has been renamed InSight and now has its own website: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov/

[Yooper]

Hello – two layperson questions about InSight’s seismometer:

One, will the instrument be able to collect data at night? Or, will the craft’s power budget rule that out?

Two, can someone offer a sense of how sensitive will the seismometer be? How small a Marsquake could it measure (could that measurement be expressed in the Richer scale?)?

Thanks!

[rlorenz]

Two, can someone offer a sense of how sensitive will the seismometer be? How small a Marsquake could it measure (could that measurement be expressed in the Richer scale?)?

There is a graph and equation of ground motion vs distance for events of different magnitude in my paper above.... (it took me a long time to find that information succinctly expressed..) So given the sensitivity in nm or nm/s or nm/s2 (depending on whether it it displacement or velocity or acceleration that the instrument measures) you can figure out how large an event is detectable at a given distance. Of course with Viking it wasnt instrument sensitivity that was the limiting factor most of the time, but the wind noise background. That was actually pretty low at night, though.

There was one possible Magnitude 3.5 event detected in the Viking data (if that's what it was, it was a couple of hundred km away), although there were not contemporaneous meteorological measurements so a wind gust or dust devil or similar event cannot be excluded. (and of course since the VL-1 seismometer didnt uncage, the event couldnt be confirmed by an independent detection which presumably would not have a wind gust at just the same time - in fact the lack of 2 or more stations was considered the major deficiency of the Viking investigation)

[Yooper]

Thanks! BTW, in a odd twist of timing, I just finished "Titan Unveiled" this morning! A very enjoyable read, and very cool timing with your reply!