Discrimination of Tectonic, Swarm and Impact-related Marsquakes using Spectral Characteristics

Abstract

The NASA InSight mission observed over 2000 marsquakes in the course of its three year mission. These quakes varied in magnitude between 1.5 and 4.5, as well as in spectral content. We present a simple framework to describe the spectral characteristics of all observed marsquakes, based on source process; propagation through the mantle or crust; and local, receiver-side amplification. We assign to each quake an objective measure of its amplitude, as well as the spectral decay created by the duration of the rupture and the dampening of high frequencies due to visco-elastic attenuation. Together, this allows us to obtain characteristic patterns of the whole marsquake dataset, e.g. in terms of event magnitudes, source size, and - for quakes caused by meteoritic impacts - crater size. We show that a significant fraction of all marsquakes - the high-frequency quakes - form a swarm that is likely not caused by tectonic processes in rocks. Our analysis allows separation of the whole marsquake catalogue into three event classes, of tectonic quakes, meteoritic impacts, and swarm events. We finally conclude that the largest marsquake, S1222a, most likely belongs to the group of meteoritic impacts.