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Rolland, Lucie

Publications and source records attributed to Rolland, Lucie.

Atmospheric waves and global seismoacoustic observations of the January 2022 Hunga eruption, Tonga

The 15 January 2022 climactic eruption of Hunga volcano, Tonga, produced an explosion in the atmosphere of a size that has not been documented in the modern geophysical record. The event generated a broad range of atmospheric waves observed globally by various ground-based and spaceborne instrumentation networks. Most prominent was the surface-guided Lamb wave (≲0.01 hertz), which we observed propagating for four (plus three antipodal) passages around Earth over 6 days. As measured by the Lamb wave amplitudes, the climactic Hunga explosion was comparable in size to that of the 1883 Krakatau eruption. The Hunga eruption produced remarkable globally detected infrasound (0.01 to 20 hertz), long-range (~10,000 kilometers) audible sound, and ionospheric perturbations. Seismometers worldwide recorded pure seismic and air-to-ground coupled waves. Air-to-sea coupling likely contributed to fast-arriving tsunamis. In this article, we highlight exceptional observations of the atmospheric waves.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Questions to Heaven

Benjamin Fernando and colleagues report on the international cooperation involved InSight's attempt to gather seismic data from the arrival at Mars of China's Zhurong rover. In one of the first collaborations of its kind, scientists working on China's Tianwen-1 mission and NASA's InSight spacecraft worked together to try and detect the seismic signatures of the Zhurong Rover's arrival at Mars. Although no signal was recorded, we present here the results of the experiment in the hope that it may act as a guide for future collaborations of this kind.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Seismic constraints from a Mars impact experiment using InSight and Perseverance

NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission has operated a sophisticated suite of seismology and geophysics instruments on the surface of Mars since its arrival in 2018. On 18 February 2021, we attempted to detect the seismic and acoustic waves produced by the entry, descent and landing of the Perseverance rover using the sensors onboard the InSight lander. Similar observations have been made on Earth using data from both crewed and uncrewed spacecraft, and on the Moon during the Apollo era, but never before on Mars or another planet. This was the only seismic event to occur on Mars since InSight began operations that had an a priori known and independently constrained timing and location. It therefore had the potential to be used as a calibration for other marsquakes recorded by InSight. Here we report that no signal from Perseverance’s entry, descent and landing is identifiable in the InSight data. Nonetheless, measurements made during the landing window enable us to place constraints on the distance–amplitude relationships used to predict the amplitude of seismic waves produced by planetary impacts and place in situ constraints on Martian impact seismic efficiency (the fraction of the impactor kinetic energy converted into seismic energy).

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗