Venus-Earth Atmospheric Monitoring for Seismicity (VeAMOS)

At the beginning of the 21th century, the Earth ocean remains a territory where the deployment of dense seismic network is extremely challenging, due to the complexity and cost in the deployment of ocean bottom broadband sensors. But at the same time, the development of Earth based very dense networks, like USArray with thousands of stations in North America or RESIF with a few hundred of stations on the French territory, are providing incredibly dense seismic data for new seismic discoveries on the Earth continents (e.g. http://www.usarray.org/science)

In Planetology, missions like InSight, possibly the future potential lunar missions of China and USA will provide us seismic stations on the Moon for the ongoing decade. But at the same time, Venus, with infernal environment and surface temperature > 450°C, is an impossible target, even for a single seismic station.

The first goal of this project, funded by IPGP Internal program and CNES and performed in collaboration with ONERA is to demonstrate, with a proof of concept based on airglow imaging, that both the detection of seismic waves signals in Earth’s ionosphere, from an Earth based camera(s), on several 10’000 locations over the ocean and an orbital mission aiming to detect seismic waves signals in Venus’ ionosphere on several 10’000 points on Venus are possible.

In additions and by achieving that goal, it will be possible to perform very high resolution surface wave tomography of the Reunion Island and then possibly, in a second stage, of the Japan arc thanks to an ongoing collaboration with ERI.