Seismic exploration on the Moon, Mars and beyond

Abstract

Seismic exploration on Earth typically relies on the deployment of extensive acquisition configurations often resulting in millions of source-receiver pairs. For the seismic method to be applicable in space, means need to be found to extract subsurface information from as little data as possible. In this paper, we illustrate how recent advances in sampling, reconstruction and analysis of seismic wavefields can help to overcome this principal logistical challenge preventing active seismic exploration in space. In particular, we show that measurements of the spatial gradients of the wavefield in addition to conventional geophone recordings can allow for detailed interpretation of seismic data with a minimumfield effort.