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.

Ions with energies significantly in excess of the applied discharge voltage have been reported for many years in hollow cathode discharges. Models of dc potential hills downstream of the cathode and instabilities in postulated double layers in the cathode orifice have been proposed to explain this, but have not been substantiated. Measurements of the dc and rf plasma density and potential profiles near the exit of hollow cathodes by miniature fast-scanning probes suggests that turbulent ion acoustic fluctuations and ionization instabilities in the cathode plume significantly increase the energy of the ions that flow from this region. Increases in the discharge current and/or decreases in the cathode gas flow enhance the amplitude of the fluctuations and increase the number and energy of the energetic ions, which increases the erosion rate of the cathode electrodes. The transition from the quiescent “spot mode” to the noisy “plume mode” characteristic of these discharges is found to be a gradual transition of increasing fluctuation amplitudes.

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Despite their long history and wide range of applicability that includes electric propulsion, detailed understanding of the driving physics inside orificed hollow cathodes remains elusive. The theoretical complexity associated with the multicomponent fluid inside the cathode, and the difficulty of accessing empirically this region, have limited our ability to design cathodes that perform better and last longer. A two-dimensional axisymmetric theoretical model of the multispecies fluid inside an orificed hollow cathode is presented. The level of detail attained by the model is allowed by its extended system of governing equations not solved for in the past within the hollow cathode. Such detail is motivated in part by the need to quantify the effect(s) of the plasma on the emitter life, and by the need to build the foundation for future modeling that will assess erosion of the keeper plate. Results from numerical simulations of a 1.2-cm-diam cathode operating at a discharge current of 25A and a gas flow rate of 5SCCM show that approximately 10A of electron current, and 3.45A of ion current return back to the emitter surface. The total emitted electron current is 33.8A and the peak emitter temperature is found to be 1440K. Comparisons with the measurements suggest that anomalous heating of the plasma is possible near the orifice region. The model predicts heavy species temperatures as high as 2034K and peak voltage drops near the emitting surface not exceeding 8V.

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