SESE – PsycheESE (Psyche Extraterrestrial Seismic Exploration)

INSTITUTION

Arizona State University (ASU)

CLASS

Platinum Class (2025 – 2026)

STUDENT TEAM

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Analyzing seismic wave propagation through the deep interior of the Earth, Mars, and the Moon is part of the ongoing effort to understand the structure, formation, and evolution of planetary interiors. The asteroid (16) Psyche is hypothesized to be the partial core of a planetesimal, and may be an ideal body to study core formation. However, it is not anticipated to be tectonically active; therefore, to conduct a similar study on the asteroid, seismic waves would need to be artificially generated. In order to determine the feasibility of generating detectable seismic signals on (16) Psyche, we utilized SeisSol, an open-source simulation software (Gabriel et al., 2025). This allowed us to simulate the seismic wave propagation from an impactor through three 3-dimensional meshes of the asteroid, each with varying complexity, structure, and composition. Then, we determined whether these generated seismic waves could be detected by a seismometer, using the SEIS instrument on NASA’s Mars InSight mission as an analog, which has a noise floor of 5X10^{-10}ms^{-2}Hz^{-½} (Lognonné et al., 2019). Finally, we developed a “user’s guide” that explains how to use SeisSol for running simulations on asteroids and other small bodies to support further scientific investigation of asteroid interiors.

 

 

 

 

This work was created in partial fulfillment of the Arizona State University Capstone Course “SES 410.” The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.