Why did Mars become uninhabitable? One scientist’s 30-year quest to get under the skin of the red planet
Soon after completing his PhD in 1989, the young scientist focused on designing a suite of seismometers hat could probe deep beneath the Martian surface in search of answers
Philippe Lognonne has waited three decades to hear the heartbeat of Mars. With a little luck and some help from Nasa, the instrument he designed to take the Red Planet’s pulse will land before the year’s end and press a hi-tech ear to its dusty surface.
As principal investigator for the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), a multi-sensor seismometer, Lognonne will have a front-row seat for the scheduled launch on Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California of Nasa’s InSight mission.
But he’s keeping the champagne corked: three times in the past, Mars space missions featuring his ultra-sensitive seismometers have faltered, failed or been scrapped.
A researcher at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, Lognonne has explored the dynamics of tsunamis and deciphered data from 1970s Apollo missions. But from the start, his true passion and unwavering mission was to build the tools that could detect what’s going on under Mars’ red surface.
“This planet was habitable 4 billion years ago, and I want to understand why, bit by bit, it stopped being so,” Lognonne said in an interview at the Paris university where he teaches.