Summary
The InSight NASA mission (Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov) landed on Mars on November 26, 2018 and operated until mid-December 2022. InSight goal was to illuminate the fundamental processes of terrestrial-planet formation and evolution by performing the first comprehensive surface-based geophysical investigation of Mars and to provide key information on the composition and structure of an Earth-like planet that has gone through most of the evolutionary stages of the Earth up to, but not including, plate tectonics. This was made using a single seismic station settled on the martian surface and carrying an ultra-sensitive, 3 axis very-broad-band seismometer completed by 3 axis short-period sensors (SEIS) and an X-Band transponder tracking the planet’s rotation. In particular, InSight delineated the basic parameters of Mars: its core’s size, mantle composition, thermal state and layering, and its crustal thickness. It also constrained the martian heat flux. In this talk, I will present the mission and its instruments and I will review what we have learned from it and what remains to be studied.
Brief biography
Born in 1979, Chloé Michaut entered the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon in 1999, where she studied Earth Sciences. She defended her PhD thesis at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) on the subject of transient thermal processes in geology in 2006, under the supervision of Claude Jaupart. She worked as a post-doctoral associate at Yale University in the United States from 2006 to 2008, where she studied the dynamics of magma-gas mixtures in collaboration with David Bercovici. In 2008, she was hired as a lecturer at the Université Paris Diderot - Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, in the Planetology and Space Sciences laboratory, to develop the field of planetary physical volcanology; she obtained her accreditation (HDR) in 2014. In 2017, she was hired at the École normale supérieure de Lyon as a university professor. In 2018, she was selected by the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) as a co-investigator of the NASA InSight mission to Mars. In 2019, she was appointed a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.