T he Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission landed on Mars on 26 November 2018 in Elysium Planitia 1,2 , 38 years after the end of Viking 2 lander operations. At the time, Viking's seismometer 3 did not succeed in making any convincing Marsquake detections, due to its on-deck installation and high wind sensitivity. InSight therefore provides the first direct geophysical in situ investigations of Mars's interior structure by seismology 1,4. The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) 5 monitors the ground acceleration with six axes: three Very Broad Band (VBB) oblique axes, sensitive to frequencies from tidal up to 10 Hz, and one vertical and two horizontal Short Period (SP) axes, covering frequencies from ~0.1 Hz to 50 Hz. SEIS is complemented by the APSS experiment 6 (InSight Auxiliary Payload Sensor Suite), which includes pressure and TWINS (Temperature and Winds for InSight) sensors and a magnetometer. These sensors monitor the atmospheric sources of seismic noise and signals 7. After seven sols (Martian days) of SP on-deck operation, with seismic noise comparable to that of Viking 3 , InSight's robotic arm 8 placed SEIS on the ground 22 sols after landing, at a location selected through analysis of InSight's imaging data 9. After levelling and noise assessment, the Wind and Thermal Shield was deployed on sol 66 (2 February 2019). A few days later, all six axes started continuous seismic recording, at 20 samples per second (sps) for VBBs and 100 sps for SPs. After onboard decimation, continuous records at rates from 2 to 20 sps and event records 5 at 100 sps are transmitted. Several layers of thermal protection and very low self-noise enable the SEIS VBB sensors to record the daily variation of the
ol 185 was a typical sol on Mars (a Mars sol is 24 h 39.5 min long, and we number sols starting from landing). The ground acceleration spectrogram recorded by the very broadband (VBB) instrument of SEIS 1-3 (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure; Fig. 1a) is dominated by the noise produced by the weakly turbulent night-time winds and by the powerful, thermally driven convective turbulence during the day 4. Around 17:00 local mean solar time (lmst), the wind fluctuations die out quite suddenly and the planet remains very quiet into the early night hours. Several distinctive features can be seen every sol on Mars. Lander vibrations activated by the wind appear as horizontal thin lines with frequency varying daily as a result of temperature variations of the lander; almost invisible during quiet hours, they are not excited by seismic events (for example, the lander mode at 4 Hz in Fig. 1a). We also observe a pronounced ambient resonance at 2.4 Hz, strongest on the vertical component, with no clear link to wind strength but excited by all the seismic vibrations at that frequency. The relative excitations of the 2.4 Hz and 4 Hz modes serve as discriminants for the origin of ground vibrations recorded by SEIS, allowing us to distinguish between local vibrations induced by atmospheric or lander activity and more distant sources of ground vibrations. On Sol 185, two weak events can also be spotted in the quiet hours of the early evening, one with a broadband frequency content and a second 80 min later, centred on the 2.4 Hz resonance band (Fig. 1a).
[1] Given that clay-rich landslides may become mobilized, leading to rapid mass movements (earthflows and debris flows), they pose critical problems in risk management worldwide. The most widely proposed mechanism leading to such flow-like movements is the increase in water pore pressure in the sliding mass, generating partial or complete liquefaction. This solid-to-liquid transition results in a dramatic reduction of mechanical rigidity in the liquefied zones, which could be detected by monitoring shear wave velocity variations. With this purpose in mind, the ambient seismic noise correlation technique has been applied to measure the variation in the seismic surface wave velocity in the Pont Bourquin landslide (Swiss Alps). This small but active composite earthslide-earthflow was equipped with continuously recording seismic sensors during spring and summer 2010. An earthslide of a few thousand cubic meters was triggered in mid-August 2010, after a rainy period. This article shows that the seismic velocity of the sliding material, measured from daily noise correlograms, decreased continuously and rapidly for several days prior to the catastrophic event. From a spectral analysis of the velocity decrease, it was possible to determine the location of the change at the base of the sliding layer. These results demonstrate that ambient seismic noise can be used to detect rigidity variations before failure and could potentially be used to predict landslides.
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