Watch:Oct.27 Prof. Taichi Kawamura: Mars Seismology as seen by InSight
Speaker: Prof. Taichi Kawamura
27 October 2022
4 pm GMT+8
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25325/insight-on-mars-illustration/?site=insight
NASA InSight mission landed on Mars on Nov. 26th 2018 and opened a new frontier of planetary seismology. The seismometer, which is one of the mains scientific payload of the mission, has been deployed on the ground in early 2019 and carried out almost continuous monitoring of Martian seismicity. During more than 1350 martian days of observation, the seismometer has detected more than 1300 marsquakes including the M4.7 giant marsquake that was detected just before the mission entered power cycling mode due to a severe power issue. The two solar panels that are used to power the spacecraft and the instrument have steadily accumulating Martian dust and the power generation has degraded significantly. The mission is now approaching the end but we have already accomplished many of the scientific objectives of the mission. In this presentation, I will describe some of the key observation of InSight and discuss the implication to Mars Science. First, I will discuss how we obtained the first internal structure model from the crust, mantle down to the core. Using some classical approach of seismology, we succeeded for the first time in defining the 1D structure of Mars. Secondly, I will describe the impact events that were detected by the seismometer and with the imagery from the orbit. Such observation which provides us with independent contraints on the location will be extremely helpful to further investigate the shallow structure of Mars. Finally, I will describe the largest marsquake detected so far, which shows many features that was not visble with other smaller marsquakes. I will conclude by summarizing the achievement of the mission by comparing this with our mission objectives.
About the Speaker
Taichi Kawamura received his PhD from University of Tokyo and University of Paris 7th in 2012. He has worked on reprocessing of Apollo seismic data and started his carreer as planetary seismologist. After obtaining his degree, he started to work for NASA InSight mission which aimed to perform the first seismic observation on Mars. Until today, he has been working as one of the core members of the mission. He was selected as the participating scientist in 2018 and since 2020, he is co-chairing the Marsquake Service, who is responsible of examining the Martian seismic data to search for marsquakes to publish the marsquake catalog. Taichi is also an active member of future space missions. He is participating in Farside Seismic Suite experiment on NASA CLPS mission, NASA Dragonfly Mission, NASA Lunar Geophysical Network, and seismic network experiment of JAXA International Space Exploration. He has been an active player in the planetary seismology community and continues to contribute to explore the new frontier of the field.
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