Vibrations from InSight's First 20 Minutes on Mars

December 07, 2018

The spectrogram of vibrations (frequency spectrum over time) recorded by two of the three sensors of the short period seismometer on NASA’s InSight lander on Mars. This spectrogram shows the first 1,000 seconds, roughly 20 minutes, of InSight’s first seismic data from the Red Planet. The vibrations of the lander are due to the wind passing over the spacecraft, particularly the large solar arrays.

JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

France’s national space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), Paris, leads the consortium that provided SEIS. The principal investigator for SEIS is Philippe Lognonné of the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, or IPGP). Imperial College, London, and Oxford University made the short-period sensors.