The Deployment of the Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) in Northwest Greenland: An Analog Experiment for Icy Ocean World Seismic Deployments

In anticipation of future spacecraft missions to icy ocean worlds, the Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) was funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to prepare for seismologic investigations of these worlds. During the summer of 2018, the SIIOS team deployed a seismic experiment on the Greenland ice sheet situated, approximately, 80 km north of Qaanaaq, Greenland. The seismometers deployed included one Trillium 120 s Posthole (TPH) broadband seismometer, 13 Silicon Audio flight-candidate seismometers, and five Sercel L28 4.5 Hz geophones. Seismometers were buried 1 m deep in the firn in a cross-shaped array centered on a collocated TPH and Silicon Audio instrument. One part of the array consisted of Silicon Audio and Sercel geophones situated 1 m from the center of the array in the ordinal directions. A second set of four Silicon Audio instruments was situated 1 km from the center of the array in the cardinal directions. A mock-lander spacecraft was placed at the array center and instrumented with four Silicon Audio seismometers. We performed an active-source experiment and a passive-listening experiment that lasted for, approximately, 12 days. The active–source experiment consisted of 9–12 sledgehammer strikes to an aluminum plate at 10 separate locations up to 100 m from the array center. The passive experiment recorded the ice-sheet ambient background noise, as well as local and regional events. Both datasets will be used to quantify differences in spacecraft instrumentation deployment strategies, and for evaluating science capabilities for single-station and small-aperture seismic arrays in future geophysical missions. Our initial results indicate that the flight-candidate seismometer performs comparably to the TPH at frequencies above 0.1 Hz and that instruments coupled to the mock-lander perform comparably to ground-based instrumentation in the frequency band of 0.1–10 Hz. For future icy ocean world missions, a deck-coupled seismometer would perform similarly to a ground-based deployment across the most frequency bands.

Detection of an excessively strong 3-μm absorption near the lunar highland crater Dufay

Using the near-infrared spectral reflectance data of the Chandrayaan-1 Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument, we report an unusually bright structure of 30 × 60 km2 on the lunar equatorial farside near crater Dufay. At this location, the 3-μm absorption band feature, which is commonly ascribed to hydroxyl (OH) and/or water (H2O), at local midday is significantly (∼30%) stronger than on the surrounding surface and, surprisingly, stronger than in the illuminated polar highlands. We did not find a similar area of excessively strong 3-μm absorption anywhere else on the Moon. A possible explanation for this structure is the recent infall of meteoritic or cometary material of high OH/H2O content forming a thin layer detectable by its pronounced 3-μm band, where a small amount of the OH/H2O is adsorbed by the surface material into binding states of relatively high activation energy. Detailed analysis of this structure with next-generation spacecraft instrumentation will provide further insight into the processes that lead to the accumulation of OH/H2O in the lunar regolith surface.

UV-Vis spectroscopy of stardust

NASA's Stardust mission flew through the coma of comet Wild 2 in January 2004, capturing dust grains as it did so. The grains were returned safely to Earth in January 2006, and are in the process of being distributed to investigators. As members of the Spectroscopy Preliminary Examination Team, we are preparing to analyse Stardust grains. Our contribution is to measure the spectrum of the grains between 200 nm (in the near ultraviolet) and 800 nm (near infrared). The purpose of the measurement is to provide an additional technique for characterizing the grains, one that is complementary to other spectroscopic techniques and one that produces results that can be matched directly with spectra acquired remotely (with telescope or spacecraft instrumentation). As part of the preparation for analysis of Stardust materials, we are producing a database of spectra from appropriate minerals, and are honing the technique through analysis of primitive meteorites.