Marouchka Froment presented our work on the inversion of infrasound signals from venusquakes to retrieve subsurface seismic velocities. The deployment of ground-based seismic or infrasound instruments can be complex and costly in remote regions on Earth. Similarly on Venus, conventional seismology is a challenge due to the extreme pressure and temperature conditions at the surface. Recent studies have demonstrated that balloon platforms can be used to monitor seismic activity from the atmosphere instead, at a low operational cost. Such balloons carry pressure sensors and record the coupling of solid seismic waves into acoustic infrasound waves, a process that is expected to be sixty times more efficient on Venus than on Earth. Thus, the analysis of infrasound waves excited by seismic surface waves and recorded in the high altitude of Venus presents an enticing alternative to traditional ground-based seismology, and could help shed light on the planet’s origin and evolution. Thus, the analysis of infrasound waves excited by seismic surface waves and recorded in the high altitude of Venus presents an enticing alternative to traditional ground-based seismology, and could help shed light on the planet’s origin and evolution.
Seismic infrasound signals show similar dispersion properties as surface waves recorded at the ground, enabling the use of classical inversion techniques to retrieve source and subsurface properties. However, it remains unclear how acoustic and instrumental noise, path effects, and the lack of polarity information translate into posterior distributions of source and subsurface parameters. In this contribution, we explore different inversion scenarios based on the characteristics of synthetic Venus signals and actual Earth observations. We propose a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo inversion method to assess the sensitivity of inversion results to the prior knowledge of the subsurface, the quality of the data, the number of balloons and the types of acoustic arrivals.