The AIR team just released a new paper Seismic Wave Detectability on Venus Using Ground Deformation Sensors, Infrasound Sensors on Balloons and Airglow Imagers (Garcia et al., 2024)! In this contribution Raphael Garcia and co authors investigate the detectability of venusquakes using either seismometers, balloons, or airglow imagers.
We do not really know what the interior of Venus looks like. Even the first-order structure of the size of Venus’ core is plagued with large uncertainties. For other planets, such as the Earth and Mars, the interior structure is much better constrained. This is largely thanks to the seismological investigations performed on these planets that revealed their interior structure by studying the seismic waves caused by quakes. In the next decade, new missions will fly to Venus to explore its tectonic and volcanic activity, which is interesting to estimate seismicity. But these missions will not be able to detect any seismic waves. In order to help design future mission concepts, we discuss instruments that could record seismic waves, as already used on the Earth, the Moon, and Mars; instruments on balloons that could float in the Venusian atmosphere; and instruments on spacecrafts that monitor the variations of atmospheric emissions caused by seismic waves originating at the surface. We compare all these different techniques with each other and with recent estimates of Venus’ seismic activity to see which of them works best in different scenarios.
- Garcia, R. F., van Zelst, I., Kawamura, T., Näsholm, S. P., Horleston, A., Klaasen, S., Lefèvre, M., Solberg, C. M., Smolinski, K. T., Plesa, A.-C., & others. (2024). Seismic wave detectability on Venus using ground deformation sensors, infrasound sensors on balloons and airglow imagers. Earth and Space Science, 11(11), e2024EA003670.