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By the end of 2018, 42 years after the landing of the two Viking seismometers on Mars, InSight will deploy onto Mars' surface the SEIS ( S eismic E xperiment for I nternal S tructure) instrument; a six-axes seismometer equipped with both a long-period three-axes Very Broad Band (VBB) instrument and a three-axes short-period (SP) instrument. These six sensors will cover a broad range of the seismic bandwidth, from 0.01 Hz to 50 Hz, with possible extension to longer periods. Data will be transmitted in the form of three continuous VBB components at 2 sample per second (sps), an estimation of the short period energy content from the SP at 1 sps and a continuous compound VBB/SP vertical axis at 10 sps. The continuous streams will be augmented by requested event data with sample rates from 20 to 100 sps. SEIS will improve upon the existing resolution of Viking's Mars seismic monitoring by a factor of ∼ 2500 at 1 Hz and ∼ 200 000 at 0.1 Hz. An additional major improvement is that, contrary to Viking, the seismometers will be deployed via a robotic arm directly onto Mars' surface and will be protected against temperature and wind by highly efficient thermal and wind shielding. Based on existing knowledge of Mars, it is reasonable to infer a moment magnitude detection threshold of M w ∼ 3 at 40 ∘ epicentral distance and a potential to detect several tens of quakes and about five impacts per year. In this paper, we first describe the science goals of the experiment and the rationale used to define its requirements. We then provide a detailed description of the hardware, from the sensors to the deployment system and associated performance, including transfer functions of the seismic sensors and temperature sensors. We conclude by describing the experiment ground segment, including data processing services, outreach and education networks and provide a description of the format to be used for future data distribution., Electronic Supplementary Material: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11214-018-0574-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The temporal fluctuations in the near plume of a 100-A LaB(6) hollow cathode are experimentally investigated. A probe array is employed to measure the amplitude and dispersion of axial modes in the plume, and these properties are examined parametrically as a function of cathode operating conditions. The onset of ion acoustic turbulence is observed at high current and is characterized by a power spectrum that exhibits a cutoff at low frequency and an inverse dependence on frequency at high values. The amplitude of the turbulence is found to decrease with flow rate but to depend nonmonotonically on discharge current. Estimates of the anomalous collision frequency based on experimental measurements indicate that the ion acoustic turbulence collision frequency can exceed the classical rate at high discharge current densities by nearly two orders of magnitude.

The ionized gas in Hall-effect plasma accelerators spans a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, and exhibits diverse physics some of which remain elusive even after decades of research. Inside the acceleration channel a quasiradial applied magnetic field impedes the current of electrons perpendicular to it in favor of a significant component in the E×B direction. Ions are unmagnetized and, arguably, of wide collisional mean free paths. Collisions between the atomic species are rare. This paper reports on a computational approach that solves numerically the 2D axisymmetric vector form of Ohm's law with no assumptions regarding the resistance to classical electron transport in the parallel relative to the perpendicular direction. The numerical challenges related to the large disparity of the transport coefficients in the two directions are met by solving the equations on a computational mesh that is aligned with the applied magnetic field. This approach allows for a large physical domain that extends more than five times the thruster channel length in the axial direction and encompasses the cathode boundary where the lines of force can become nonisothermal. It also allows for the self-consistent solution of the plasma conservation laws near the anode boundary, and for simulations in accelerators with complex magnetic field topologies. Ions are treated as an isothermal, cold (relative to the electrons) fluid, accounting for the ion drag in the momentum equation due to ion-neutral (charge-exchange) and ion-ion collisions. The density of the atomic species is determined using an algorithm that eliminates the statistical noise associated with discrete-particle methods. Numerical simulations are presented that illustrate the impact of the above-mentioned features on our understanding of the plasma in these accelerators.