By the end of 2018, 42 years after the landing of the two Viking seismometers on Mars, InSight will deploy onto Mars’ surface the SEIS ( S eismic E xperiment for I nternal S tructure) instrument; a six-axes seismometer equipped with both a long-period three-axes Very Broad Band (VBB) instrument and a three-axes short-period (SP) instrument. These six sensors will cover a broad range of the seismic bandwidth, from 0.01 Hz to 50 Hz, with possible extension to longer periods. Data will be transmitted in the form of three continuous VBB components at 2 sample per second (sps), an estimation of the short period energy content from the SP at 1 sps and a continuous compound VBB/SP vertical axis at 10 sps. The continuous streams will be augmented by requested event data with sample rates from 20 to 100 sps. SEIS will improve upon the existing resolution of Viking’s Mars seismic monitoring by a factor of at 1 Hz and at 0.1 Hz. An additional major improvement is that, contrary to Viking, the seismometers will be deployed via a robotic arm directly onto Mars’ surface and will be protected against temperature and wind by highly efficient thermal and wind shielding. Based on existing knowledge of Mars, it is reasonable to infer a moment magnitude detection threshold of at epicentral distance and a potential to detect several tens of quakes and about five impacts per year. In this paper, we first describe the science goals of the experiment and the rationale used to define its requirements. We then provide a detailed description of the hardware, from the sensors to the deployment system and associated performance, including transfer functions of the seismic sensors and temperature sensors. We conclude by describing the experiment ground segment, including data processing services, outreach and education networks and provide a description of the format to be used for future data distribution. Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (10.1007/s11214-018-0574-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We demonstrate a microseismometer with a 2ng/rtHz noise floor capable of autonomous operation over a wide range of tilts. This represents the highest performance yet achieved by a silicon-based vibration sensor. The microseismometer builds on previous development of a shortperiod seismometer for NASA's 2016 InSight mission to Mars . The deep-reactive-ion-etched sensor element is unique in that it uses a spring-mass system with a proof mass that moves laterally. This minimizes the damping of the spring mass systems without the need for vacuum encapsulation. The proof-mass position is sensed by a periodic linear capacitive array transducer allowing highly sensitive position detection combined with feedback control at multiple null points. Operation at any of these points enables the sensor to function over a large tilt range without compromising the noise performance. As well as the capacitive sensing elements, the proof mass has planar coils on the surface to electromagnetic actuator when placed in a static magnetic field. The MEMS sensor element is connected to an electronics feedback circuit similar to those used in broad-band seismometers allowing the sensor to act as a velocity output force balance transducer.

No abstract

No abstract

A lateral suspension, suitable for a microseismometer application, has been fabricated using deep reactive-ion etching. The critical dynamic parameters of the suspension, namely the normal modes along the compliant axis and the damping, have been determined from slow-scan imaging in an environmental scanning electron microscope. The results show the presence of an unwanted spurious mode which can be attributed to the finite mass of the suspension. An analytical solution yields good agreement with observations. Damping is shown to be dominated by viscous effects, with the suspension material only limiting performance at high vacuum.