The First Detection of an Earthquake From a Balloon Using Its Acoustic Signature
Abstract
Extreme temperature and pressure conditions on the surface of Venus present formidable technological challenges against performing ground-based seismology. Efficient coupling between the Venusian atmosphere and the solid planet theoretically allows the study of seismically generated acoustic waves using balloons in the upper atmosphere, where conditions are far more clement. However, earthquake detection from a balloon has never been demonstrated. We present the first detection of an earthquake from a balloon-borne microbarometer near Ridgecrest, CA in July 2019 and include a detailed analysis of the dependence of seismic infrasound, as measured from a balloon on earthquake source parameters, topography, and crustal and atmospheric structure. Our comprehensive analysis of seismo-acoustic phenomenology demonstrates that seismic activity is detectable from a high-altitude platform on Earth, and that Rayleigh wave-induced infrasound can be used to constrain subsurface velocities, paving the way for the detection and characterization of such signals on Venus.
Additional Information
© 2021. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Issue Online: 21 June 2021; Version of Record online: 21 June 2021; Accepted manuscript online: 20 May 2021; Manuscript accepted: 23 April 2021; Manuscript revised: 20 April 2021; Manuscript received: 16 February 2021. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Strategic Research and Technology Development and the Instantaneous and Spontaneous Concept grants at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Support from the NASA Planetary Science and Technology through Analog Research (PSTAR) program is also gratefully acknowledged. In addition, the authors would like to thank Noah Yared, Christine Yuan, Kyle Weng, Michael Lally, Luan Nguen, David Komjathy, Adam Komjathy, and Katalin Komjathy for their assistance in constructing Heliotrope envelopes. They thank Kirk Barrow and Chris Yahnker (JPL) for their help in recovering the balloons. Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, CA is gratefully acknowledged for providing space for Heliotrope construction. The authors would like to thank Zachary Ross, Yan Yang, and Zhe Jia (Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) for insightful discussions regarding earthquake catalogs and the interpretation of regional seismic data. They also thank the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies for their early support of the balloon-based seismology project. Finally, they would like to thank the two reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions for the manuscript. Part of this research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology with support from internal research and development grants, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract No. DENA0003525. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government, the United States Department of Energy, or Sandia National Laboratories. Data Availability Statement: Data Availability Seismic waveform data and earthquake catalogs were accessed through the Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC, https://scedc.caltech.edu/data/) at Caltech (Southern California Earthquake Center, 2013). The community velocity models are obtained through the UCVM software framework maintained by Southern California Earthquake Center (Small et al., 2017). Balloon microbarometer and simulation data are available on a publicly accessible FigShare repository with https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14374067.Attached Files
Published - 2021GL093013.pdf
Supplemental Material - 2021gl093013-sup-0001-supporting_information_si-s01.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 109287
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210527-154947306
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-NA0003525
- JPL Research and Technology Development Fund
- Created
-
2021-05-27Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-06-23Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Seismological Laboratory, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)