NASA finds quietest place in the UK to test Mars mission equipment

Recent tests undertaken in the Ultra-Low Noise Lab at the University of Bristol's Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information (NSQI) have shown it to be the quietest location in the UK in the critical seismic frequency range that scientists expect to encounter on Mars.

The Short Period Seismometer is the UK’s contribution towards the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission and makes up half of the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS).

The SEIS is the primary instrument on the probe and is designed to measure signals from marsquakes and meteorite impacts.  The mission aims to discover much about the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.

Dr Nick Teanby, Dr James Wookey, Jenny Taylor and Dr Anna Horleston from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences have been working with the NSQI’s Dr Pete Dunton to see how the Ultra-Low Noise Lab can be used to help calibrate and test the Mars-bound instrument.

These tests will be some of the most vibration sensitive yet to take advantage of the NSQI's exceptional facility and will be performed by the Bristol team together with collaborators from Imperial College London, the University of Oxford and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

InSight is scheduled to land on Mars in September 2016 to begin a two-year science mission. InSight is a lander that will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science — understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system more than 4 billion years ago.

The mission will investigate the interior structure and processes of Mars to understand better the evolution of rocky planets such as Earth. InSight will perform this science using two instrument packages (see video).