THE SËISMIC NÖISE DISCOGRAPHY: ATMOSPHERIC HITS WITH THE
INSIGHT MISSION.
A. Spiga1,2 , with the InSight Atmospheres Science Team Group [see citations for a faithful rendering of coauthorship], 1 Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique [LMD], Sorbonne Université, Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, France, 2 Institut Universitaire de France.

InSight is an international, multidisciplinary NASA
mission to Mars, which primary goal is to explore the
interior of terrestrial planets 1 . A major instrument on
board the InSight spacecraft is the ultra-sensitive broadband seismometer SEIS 2 . The exquisite sensitivity of
SEIS lays the foundation for the multi-disciplinary approach of InSight: to be able to measure subtle surface
displacements caused by activity at the surface and interior of Mars, seismometers reach a level of sensitivity
that makes them vulnerable to sources of background
noise, for instance atmospheric motions exciting the surface.
Seismologists are those kind of musicians composing music in silence, seeking for the couple harmonic
uplifting notes coming from the interior that speak volumes to the human soul. Atmospheric scientists are
those kind of musicians engulfed in a permanently windy
world, in love with turbulence and storms, interested by
the energy conveyed by music and how it could make
the human body move. InSight is an improbable gathering of those two different kinds of musicians. In a
nutshell, in the InSight team, poor seismologists are trying to concentrate on their subtle and harmonic music
– the SEISMIC SIGN AL of the marsquakes – while,
on the room just aside, crazy atmospheric scientists are
blasting epic heavy metal riffs at stratospheric volumes
under the now-legendary moniker SËISMIC NÖISE.
InSight is an incredibly successful mission. The
goals set up for the mission on Mars’ geophysics have all
been fulfilled, often better than expectations 3 . Even the
impossibility of the HP3 probe to penetrate the martian
subsurface has brought new knowledge on the complex
cohesion properties of the Martian regolith 4 . Despite not
being within the primary goals of the mission and being
included as auxiliary measurements 5,6 , atmospheric science with InSight has been integral part of the success
of the mission. In other words, as much as anything
else, SËISMIC NÖISE is music (Figure 1). Here we
propose, at the nadir of the career of SËISMIC NÖISE
given the forthcoming death (or zombie status) of InSight, a review of the SËISMIC NÖISE discography
a.k.a. the extensive work of the InSight Atmospheres
science team group.
InSight works very well as a weather station on
Mars. A realization of this occurred early in the InSight
mission when a large regional dust storm raged close
to the Elysium Planitia location of the mission 7 . The

Figure 1: Cover of the first album of SËISMIC NÖISE. Design modified from a Placeit template.

wind sensors of InSight also evidence the main globalscale and regional-scale circulation regimes 8 that were
predicted by global circulation models 6 . The highlysensitive pressure sensor at the equatorial site of InSight
allows us to monitor over seasonal timescales the prominent modes of midlatitudes planetary waves caused by
baroclinic instability 8 [Forget et al. in preparation], a
notably difficult task from orbit. InSight also records a
rich activity of pressure (and, for the strongest events,
wind) fluctuations caused by the propagation of gravity
waves; for the first time on Mars, bores and long infrasounds – close to the Brunt-Väisälä frequency limit – are
identified in InSight’s pressure records 8 . The inclusion
of a magnetometer on board InSight can also be used
to probe wind-driven fields in the ionosphere and their
diurnal and seasonal variability 9 .
As a turbulence explorator, InSight is a particularly
rich experiment. The exploration of turbulent fluctuations of pressure down to a couple of hertz for multiple
complete sols is unprecedented on Mars. InSight pressure measurements show that, akin to Earth measurements, the daytime turbulent spectra of pressure is not
following the Kolmogorov scaling 8 which is a concrete
example as to how Mars’ atmosphere could serve as

SËISMIC NÖISE playing atmospheric music on Mars

Figure 2:
Standard deviation of InSight pressure measurements (yellow 0.12 Pa, black 0 Pa) in the range Ls 240290°demonstrating that, at this season, the nighttime Martian atmosphere is as turbulent as the daytime one 10 . This surprising
high level of nocturnal turbulence in the dusty season results from the subtle combination of a stronger low-level jet, producing
shear-driven turbulence, and a weaker stability. As a matter of fact, the level of nocturnal turbulence undergoes modulation by
sol-to-sol variability of large-scale wind speed (measured by InSight) caused by planetary waves associated with baroclinic instability. This figure demonstrates how the InSight weather station is capable to probe many spatial and temporal scales relevant to
Martian weather.

an excellent additional laboratory to Earth’s for fluid
dynamics studies. The seasonal variability of highfrequency fluctuations of pressure probed by InSight
also revealed the high level of turbulence in the dusty
season of Mars 10 (even featuring nighttime putatively
vortex-induced pressure drops) with a subtle combination of increased background wind and reduced stability that gives rise to an active shear-driven convective
regime (Figure 2). Daytime and nighttime spectra are
also particularly distinct, with many implications [Temel
et al. in revision] A particularly interesting perspective of InSight is how complementary it has been to the
exploration of ultra-high-frequency dissipation-regime
fluctuations by Perseverance’s microphone [Murdoch et
al. this issue].
The topic of dust devils pertains to turbulence, but
InSight encounters with dust devils deserve particular
mention. To form a dust devil on Mars, you need a)
small, turbulent, whirlwinds named convective vortices;
b) dust particles being lifted and transported in those
whirlwinds. As it is obvious in the very first acquisitions of InSight’s pressure sensors, daytime convective
vortices are very abundant at InSight’s landing site 8,11,12 ,
even reaching an impressive burst of activity in northern fall and winter 10 . Aeolian activity is also strong at

InSight in Elysium Planitia, particularly related to vortex activity 13,14 giving rise to tracks visible from orbit 15 .
Despite those elements, and a good imaging coverage
by InSight’s cameras, not a single dust devil has been
detected thus far at the InSight landing site, making an
anomaly with respect to other sites visited by in situ
spacecraft on Mars (Figure 3).
Inasmuch as heavy metal can be considered music
or noise depending on the subjective point of view of the
considered operator, seismic signatures caused by atmospheric features could be considered as either signal or
noise depending on whether or not you are a hardcore
fan of the SËISMIC NÖISE band. At any event, seismic acquisitions by InSight gives to this mission a very
original and interesting twist for atmospheric science. A
first example is how the distinctive seismic signatures of
convective vortices 16,17 can be used as seismic sources to
probe the first meters below InSight 18 (see also Onodera
et al. accepted 2022), to the point of revealing subsurface spatial heterogeneity in the vicinity of InSight 19 . A
second example is how wind noise on seismic records
can be explored with methods enlightening areas of improvements for both quake detection and the use of SEIS
as a wind sensor 20,21 . A third example is how pressure
and seismic measurements can be combined to search for

REFERENCES

References

Figure 3: InSight on Mars. Dust everywhere Loads of dust
particles on the deck and solar panels. Nevertheless, not any
dust devil spotted in the whole mission. IDC image on sol
1211, April 24, 2022 at local time 2PM. NASA/JPL-Caltech.

infrasound signals – which has actually resulted difficult
to detect 22,23 – as well as, possibly, gravity waves 24 .
At the time of writing, InSight has almost two complete martian years of observing time. The energy situation is, however, difficult since the beginning of the
second martian year of InSight operations. Both dust
accumulation over solar panels 25 and the seasonal evolution of column dust optical depth is putting strong
constraints on energy available at InSight’s solar panels 26 . Additional energy was obtained, however, by an
original approach to dump dust particles with InSight’s
arm and scoop over the InSight’s platform (see the dust
pile in Figure 3) and use the wind-induced kinetic energy of the largest dust particles to clean the solar panels
from the deposited smaller dust particles, in an active
saltation experiment [Golombek et al. in preparation].
Despite this, the atmospheric sensors are switched off
most of the time in the second martian year of InSight
operations; interannual studies can still be carried out
with the atmospheric data acquired in this second year
of operation. Once corrected from a long-term drift of
the sensor temperature, interannual pressure measurements indicate that the permanent CO2 ice cap mass do
not seem to undergo multiannual change (Lange et al.
2022 in revision). Wind measurements on board InSight
over two distinct martian years are compliant with the
known strong repeatability of the martian weather, but
subtle interannual differences are noticed with interesting perspectives for comparison with models [Newman
et al. in preparation].

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