The Deployment of the Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) on Gulkana Glacier, Alaska

The Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) is a NASA-funded analog mission program to test flight-candidate instrumentation on icy-ocean world analog sites. In September 2017, an SIIOS experiment was deployed on Gulkana Glacier. The instrumentation included a Nanometrics Trillium 120 s Posthole seismometer, four Nanometrics Trillium Compact (TC) seismometers, four Mark Products L28 geophones, and five each of Silicon Audio (SiA) 203P-15 and 203P-60 seismometers. The SiA sensors served as our flight-candidate instruments. The instrumentation was arranged in a small (< 2 m) aperture array with most sensors deployed in the ice. We also placed five of the SiA seismometers on top of a mock lander to simulate placement on a lander deck. The instrumentation recorded an active-source experiment immediately after deployment and then passively for 13 days. We conducted an active-source experiment using a sledgehammer striking an aluminum plate at 13 locations, with 9-13 shots occurring at each location. During the passive observation, the experiment recorded one large M-w 7.1 event that occurred in Mexico and four other teleseismic events with M-w > 6.0. The active- and passive-source signals are being used to constrain the local glacial hydrological structure, environmental seismicity, to develop algorithms to detect and locate seismic sources, and to quantify the similarities and differences in science capabilities between sensors. Initial results indicate the flight-candidate instrumentation performs comparably to the Trillium Posthole up to periods of 3 s, after which the flight-candidate performs more comparably to the TCs.