Il Sang Ahn
University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK·Earth & Environmental Science
Future landers on Venus could listen for quakes to learn about the planet's interior, but wind may drown out the signal. Wind-induced noise in seismometer data has troubled missions since early Mars exploration.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Topics
Venus
planetary seismology
seismometer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether cracks and gaps in natural ground cause nonlinear coupling between wind and seismic vibrations that shows up as wind-induced noise in seismometer data.
- Collect seismic signals from a heat-shielded broadband seismometer under simulated Venus surface conditions in NASA Glenn's Extreme Environments Rig.
- Produce high-quality experimental datasets that document nonlinear dynamic behavior under combined wind and seismic shaking, to support future noise-cancelling techniques for Venus landers.
More about the research
On Venus, with surface temperatures near 450°C and pressures around 90 bar, a similar problem is expected. Reliable noise-cancelling methods will therefore be needed to record clear seismic signals there. This project studies the physics of that noise.
Why it matters
Understanding how wind contaminates seismic recordings could help future Venus lander missions separate real quake signals from noise. That would let mission scientists learn more about the planet's interior from seismometers on its surface. The experimental data could also support work on noise-cancelling methods for seismometers on other windy planets such as Mars.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Ahmed Elbanna
University of Southern California, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Rebuild the Unified Community Velocity Model as UCVM-Next, replacing legacy file formats with Zarr and TileDB array storage so that three-dimensional seismic velocity models carry versioning, provenance and validation information.
Zachary Eilon
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Test predicted signatures of dynamic upwelling beneath mid-ocean ridges using surface- and body-wave tomography from roughly 80 ocean-bottom seismometers deployed across the Pacific-Cocos and Cocos-Nazca spreading centers.
The school
University of Alaska Fairbanks: 7 labs on PI Pages, $246M a year on research, 31 research doctorates a year.
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