Journal article : Letter
Seismic constraints from a Mars impact experiment using InSight and Perseverance
- Abstract:
- NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission has operated a sophisticated suite of seismology and geophysics instruments on the surface of Mars since its arrival in 2018. On 18 February 2021, we attempted to detect the seismic and acoustic waves produced by the entry, descent and landing of the Perseverance rover using the sensors onboard the InSight lander. Similar observations have been made on Earth using data from both crewed1,2 and uncrewed3,4 spacecraft, and on the Moon during the Apollo era5, but never before on Mars or another planet. This was the only seismic event to occur on Mars since InSight began operations that had an a priori known and independently constrained timing and location. It therefore had the potential to be used as a calibration for other marsquakes recorded by InSight. Here we report that no signal from Perseverance’s entry, descent and landing is identifiable in the InSight data. Nonetheless, measurements made during the landing window enable us to place constraints on the distance–amplitude relationships used to predict the amplitude of seismic waves produced by planetary impacts and place in situ constraints on Martian impact seismic efficiency (the fraction of the impactor kinetic energy converted into seismic energy).
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41550-021-01502-0
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Astronomy More from this journal
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 59–64
- Publication date:
- 2021-10-28
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-08-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2397-3366
- ISSN:
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2397-3366
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
-
Letter
- Pubs id:
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1209012
- Local pid:
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pubs:1209012
- Deposit date:
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2021-11-24
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Fernando et al
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- ©2021 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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