Preparing for InSight: Evaluation of the Blind Test for Martian Seismicity

Abstract

In December 2018, the NASA InSight mission deployed a seismometer on the surface of Mars. In preparation for the data analysis, in July 2017 the Mars Quake Service initiated a blind test, in which participants were asked to detect and characterize seismicity embedded in a one Earth year long synthetic dataset of continuous waveforms. Synthetic data were computed for a single station, mimicking the streams that will be available from InSight as well as the expected tectonic and impact seismicity, and noise conditions on Mars (Clinton et al. 2017). In total, 84 teams from 20 countries registered for the blind test and 11 of them submitted their results in early 2018. The collection of documentations, methods, ideas and codes submitted by the participants exceeds 100 pages. The teams proposed well established as well as novel methods \nto tackle the challenging target of building a global seismicity catalogue using a single station. This paper summarizes the performance of the teams, and highlights the most successful contributions.