France-United States space cooperation - InSight Mars exploration mission - First tests of French SEIS seismometer successful

After the excitement and tension of its successful landing on Mars on Monday 26 November, InSight has started powering up and checking out its subsystems. The SEIS1 seismometer, supplied by CNES as lead contractor with the IPGP global physics institute in Paris as principal investigator working with teams at the French national scientific research centre CNRS, was tested out on Friday 30 November. Everything is nominal and the instrument is in great shape.

• 1In addition to CNES and IPGP, in collaboration with Sodern, JPL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS, Göttingen, Germany) Imperial College London and Oxford University supplied subsystems for SEIS.