Abstract
In early 2019, NASA’s InSight lander successfully deployed a single
three-component very broadband seismometer (VBB) on the surface of Mars
to detect and characterize marsquakes. Using these data, we present a
method to infer the source mechanisms of marsquakes from waveforms of P
and S waves recorded at a single station. We show that the three events
with the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a robust distance
estimate S0173a, (May 23rd 2019), S0235b, (July 27th 2019) and S0183a,
(June 3rd 2019) are all likely the results of normal faulting,
suggesting an extensional regime mainly oriented south-east north-west
in the respective source regions, Cerberus Fossae and Orcus Patera. We
quantify the uncertainty of our solutions by comparing results of a
direct inversion with a grid-search method.