SP Seminar - Four years of InSight and impacts on Mars

When:  Thursday 22 June at 14.00

Where:  Robert Hooke/Teams Online

Speaker:  Dr Ben Fernando – University of Oxford

Hosted by: Lee White

Abstract:

By the time of its untimely demise in December of last year, NASA’s InSight mission detected over a thousand quakes on Mars. Amongst these were eight impact events - generated by meteoroids striking the planet’s surface at hypervelocity speeds. These impact events were invaluable in our studies of Mars’ interior, but our explorations of them raised many more questions than we were able to answer. In this talk I will present some of the work done within the team to predict, detect, identify, and use these events as part of our geophysical exploration of Mars, and also consider how some of the science discoveries made might be applied to future missions, including on the Moon, Titan, and beyond

BIO:

I'm a postgraduate fellow at Christ Church College and in the Department of Physics. My academic research is in planetary geophysics, specifically seismology. I work on the NASA InSight mission to Mars and the Dragonfly mission to Titan and have previously worked on the JAXA Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu. Mostly, I work on running computational simulations of wave propagation in the oceans, atmospheres, and interiors of these bodies. Sometimes I work on the Earth too! I also help run Christ Church's Access and Outreach programs, which focus on building a more inclusive environment within the college and recruiting student from under-represented backgrounds to Oxford. Alongside my academic research I'm a Midshipman in the Royal Navy Reserves, based at HMS President in London; and write on a number of science policy topics.