Lecture - Dr Anna Horleston - “What's shaking Mars? An overview of NASA's InSight mission”

About Dr Anna Horelston

I am a UK Space Agency Fellow in Planetary Seismology. I have had a diverse career starting out with several years working in broadband seismology managing deployments in locations all over the world. I have performed passive and controlled source field work and have been invovled with projects monitoring features including glaciers, volcanoes, subduction zones, passive basins and oil and gas drilling. My interests lie in seismic instrumentation, network management and data interpretation.

After more than a decade of Earth-based work I turned my sights off-world and joined the science team for NASA's InSight Mission to Mars.

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) was a Mars Lander that launched in May 2018 and arrived on Mars in November 2018. It deployed a seismic station on the surface of Mars, containing both broadband and short period sensors. The mission was looking for tectonic and impact events in order to determine the structure of Mars and improve our understanding of planetary formation - goals that it has achieved. I co-led the MarsQuake Service, managing day-to-day operations of the analysis team, detecting and cataloguing the seismicity, and reporting to the wider mission teams.

I am also passionate about outreach and education and alongside the many public talks I do, I was Co-I on a UK Space Agency Aurora Outreach and Education grant developing curriculum resources for Welsh schools. I was previously awarded a Royal Society Partnership Grant in 2013 to help run a series of workshops with Birdwell Academy (Primary school), Bristol and have also worked with We The Curious (Bristol) to develop a workshop on seismicity and risk sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineers. I have links with Techniquest (Cardiff) and the National Space Centre, and have appeared on the BBC's Sky At Night and the World Service's Science in Action several times. I am interested in making science accessible to all and have worked with the Lightyear Foundation and Flamingo Chicks and am a member of the SEN in STEM network.

Source: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Anna-Horleston-2421de3a-aefd-45f4-a991-db775e1b95bf/