Dear Colleagues,
The InSight mission will land a broadband seismometer on Mars in 2018. In preparation for the mission, the InSight team have devised a blind test in which we invite participants to detect and characterise seismicity included in a synthetic dataset of continuous waveforms from a single station. The waveforms mimic both the streams of data that will be available from InSight, as well as the expected level of tectonic and impact seismicity and the noise conditions on Mars. The test is 'blind' in the sense that the actual event catalogue is not provided to any participants, and the structural model used to generate the seismograms has been selected from a suite of 14 candidate models.
In the course of the blind test, we hope to learn from the methodologies proposed by the community and consequently improve the planned single station location methods to be used in the routine analysis of the martian dataset. The blind test is described in detail in a recent publication in SRL [1].
The test officially opened on 1 August 2017 and registration will close on 1 October 2017. All participants must provide their event catalogues by 1 February 2018. A website where interested parties can register and access seismic waveforms is at
http://blindtest.mars.ethz.ch .
All groups who contribute a catalogue to the blind test will be invited to be coauthors on a paper summarising methods and performance with respect to the true event catalogue that will then be released.
We encourage scientists and students, in teams of any size, to investigate the blind test dataset and we look forward to your participation!
John Clinton on behalf of the InSight Blind Test team [1]
[1] Clinton et al. (2017). Preparing for InSight: an invitation to participate in a blind test for Martian seismicity, Seism. Res. Letters, doi: 10.1785/0220170094
John Clinton
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