Abstract

Planet Mars has fascinated humanity since the beginning of time and prompted fundamental questions: is water present, and could habitable environments or even life have existed? NASA’s InSight mission (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) addressed these questions indirectly by targeting Mars’ interior. The InSight mission deployed a robotic geophysical station on the Martian surface with the scientific goal of constraining the planet’s structure and early evolution using seismic, geothermal, and geodetic measurements. InSight’s goals were to advance comparative planetology across the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and to improve models of how rocky worlds formed and differentiated.

In this seminar, I will focus on how InSight’s data also enabled unexpectedly detailed insights into the shallow subsurface at the landing site. Seismic signals generated by the HP³ heat-probe hammering provided constraints on P- and S-wave velocities in the uppermost metre. A complementary analysis of Rayleigh-wave ellipticity yielded constraints on near-surface layering and revealed evidence for a shallow sedimentary unit interbedded between volcanic layers. Together, these results illustrate how mission data collected for deep-interior objectives can be leveraged to resolve metre- to tens-of-metres-scale structure, with implications for surface processes, landing-site geology, and future exploration.