2017-09-12

Gearing up to Explore the Inner Life of Mars

The InSight Mars mission is planned to launch in spring 2018 and will place a seismometer on the surface of Mars six months later. Scientists at ETH Zurich from the Seismology and Geodynamics (SEG) group as well as the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) are participating in the Marsquake Service that will routinely detect and characterise seismic signals recorded by the sensor. The data will be used to explore the inner life of the planet.

However, with only one seismometer this is a very challenging task. In contrast to a seismic network on earth with numerous stations, additional reference points that constrain the origin of the signals registered is missing. In preparation of the mission, scientists with experience in earthquake location and characterisation problems are invited to share their knowledge by participating in a blind test.

Based on a synthetic dataset, we aim to improve the planned single station location methods to be used in the routine analysis of the martian dataset. The waveforms provided in the blind test mimic both the streams of data that will be available from InSight, as well as the expected level of tectonic and impact seismicity and the noise conditions on Mars. The test is 'blind' in the sense that the actual event catalogue is not provided to any participants, and the structural model used to generate the seismograms has been selected from a suite of 14 candidate models. In course of the blind test, we hope to learn from the methodologies proposed by the community. The blind test is described in detail in a recent publication in SRL (Clinton et al., 2017, Preparing for InSight: an invitation to participate in a blind test for Martian seismicity, Seism. Res. Letters, doi: 10.1785/0220170094).

The test officially opened on 1 August 2017 and registration will close on 1 October 2017. All participants must provide their event catalogues by 1 February 2018.  A website where interested parties can register and access seismic waveforms is available at http://blindtest.mars.ethz.ch.

All groups who contribute a catalogue to the blind test will be invited to be co-authors on a paper summarising methods and performance with respect to the true event catalogue that will then be released.

We encourage scientists and students, in teams of any size, to investigate the blind test dataset and we look forward to your participation!