Seismic Wave Detectability on Venus Using Ground Deformation Sensors, Infrasound Sensors on Balloons and Airglow Imagers.

The relatively unconstrained internal structure of Venus is a missing piece in our understanding of the formation and evolution of the Solar System. Detection of seismic waves generated by venusquakes is crucial to determine the seismic structure of Venus' interior, as recently shown by the new seismic and geodetic constraints on Mars' interior obtained by the InSight mission. In the next decade multiple missions will fly to Venus to explore its tectonic and volcanic activity, but they will not be able to conclusively detect seismic waves, despite their potential to detect fault movements. Looking toward the next fleet of Venus missions after the ones already decided, various concepts to measure seismic waves have been proposed. These detection methods include typical geophysical ground sensors already deployed on Earth, the Moon, and Mars; pressure sensors on balloons; and imagers of high altitude emissions (airglow) on orbiters. The latter two methods target the detection of the infrasound signals generated by seismic waves and amplified during their upward propagation. Here, we provide a first comparison between the detection capabilities of these different measurement techniques and recent estimates of Venus' seismic activity. In addition, we discuss the performance requirements and measurement durations required to detect seismic waves with the various detection methods. Our study clearly presents the advantages and limitations of the different seismic wave detection techniques and can be used to drive the design of future mission concepts aiming to study the seismicity of Venus. Plain Language Summary: We do not really know what the interior of Venus looks like. Even the first‐order structure of the size of Venus' core is plagued with large uncertainties. For other planets, such as the Earth and Mars, the interior structure is much better constrained. This is largely thanks to the seismological investigations performed on these planets that revealed their interior structure by studying the seismic waves caused by quakes. In the next decade, new missions will fly to Venus to explore its tectonic and volcanic activity, which is interesting to estimate seismicity. But these missions will not be able to detect any seismic waves. In order to help design future mission concepts, we discuss instruments that could record seismic waves, as already used on the Earth, the Moon, and Mars; instruments on balloons that could float in the Venusian atmosphere; and instruments on spacecrafts that monitor the variations of atmospheric emissions caused by seismic waves originating at the surface. We compare all these different techniques with each other and with recent estimates of Venus' seismic activity to see which of them works best in different scenarios. Key Points: The capabilities of various measurement concepts to detect quakes on Venus are estimated and compared to recent Venus seismicity estimatesGround sensors are limited by their short measurement duration, but also by an atmosphere induced noise that may be above their self noiseAtmospheric seismology concepts are limited to large quake magnitudes, and airglow imagers are favored relative to balloon measurements [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]