The AIR team just released a new preprint Aerial and Space-borne Seismology on Venus: Viability and Design Implications for Future Missions (Brissaud et al., 2025)! In this contribution we explore the potential of hybrid balloon-airglow missions for Venus exploration. We perform a range of sensitivity tests in terms of signal frequency, balloon and airglow imager paths, and seismic velocity models, and also investigate the detectability of volcanic sequences.
The interior of Venus remains a mystery because we lack seismic data. Such data were key to constrain the Moon’s and Mars’ subsurface. While upcoming missions will study Venus’ surface and atmosphere, they will not carry instruments capable of detecting seismic waves from the ground. Because Venus’ surface is extremely hot and under intense pressure, deploying traditional seismometers is challenging. As an alternative, scientists have proposed using high-altitude balloons and orbiting airglow cameras to detect pressure waves or light emissions in the atmosphere that may be triggered by venusquakes. In this study, we apply physics-based models and probabilistic methods to evaluate how well balloon and airglow observations would detect seismic events under realistic atmospheric and geological conditions. We show that a balloon network covering about 5,000 km could detect at least one venusquake with up to 65% chance over a 6-month mission. The detection rates are even higher—above 90%—when using airglow observations from orbit. These findings suggest that future missions combining these techniques will provide valuable seismic data to reveal Venus’ internal structure.
- Brissaud, Q., Kong, C., Wilding, J., Gülcher, A. J. P., Jackson, J. M., Froment, M., Näsholm, S. P., Garcia, R. F., Solberg, C. M., & van Zelst, I. (2025). Aerial and Space-borne Seismology on Venus: Viability and Design Implications for Future Missions. Earth and Space Science.