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A Deep Catalogue of Marsquakes
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  • Nikolaj L. Dahmen,
  • John F. Clinton,
  • Men-Andrin Meier,
  • Simon C. Stähler,
  • Savas Ceylan,
  • Doyeon Kim,
  • Alexander E. Stott,
  • Domenico Giardini
Nikolaj L. Dahmen
ETH Zurich

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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John F. Clinton
ETH Zurich
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Men-Andrin Meier
ETH Zurich
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Simon C. Stähler
ETH Zurich
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Savas Ceylan
ETH Zurich
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Doyeon Kim
ETH Zurich
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Alexander E. Stott
ISAE SUPAERO
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Domenico Giardini
ETH Zurich
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Abstract

NASA’s InSight seismometer has been recording Martian seismicity since early 2019, and to date, over 1300 marsquakes have been catalogued by the Marsquake Service (MQS). Due to typically low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of marsquakes, their detection and analysis remain challenging: while event amplitudes are relatively low, the background noise has large diurnal and seasonal variations and contains various signals originating from the interactions of the local atmosphere with the lander and seismometer system. Since noise can resemble marsquakes in a number of ways, the use of conventional detection methods for catalogue curation is limited. Instead, MQS finds events through manual data inspection. Here, we present MarsQuakeNet (MQNet), a deep convolutional neural network for the detection of marsquakes and the removal of noise contamination. Based on three-component seismic data, MQNet predicts segmentation masks that identify and separate event and noise energy in time-frequency domain. As the number of catalogued MQS events is small, we combine synthetic event waveforms with recorded noise to generate a training data set. We apply MQNet to the entire continuous 20 samples-per-second waveform data set available to date, for automatic event detection and for retrieving denoised amplitudes. The algorithm reproduces all high quality-, as well as majority of low quality events in the manual, carefully curated MQS catalogue. Furthermore, MQNet detects 60% additional events that were previously unknown with mostly low SNR, that are verified in manual review. Our analysis on the event rate confirms seasonal trends and shows a substantial increase in the second Martian year.
Nov 2022Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets volume 127 issue 11. 10.1029/2022JE007503