Francis Nimmo

About

Francis Nimmo is a Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on understanding how planets and satellites have evolved to their current states and explaining the diverse characteristics observed across planetary bodies. He investigates questions such as why Earth and Ganymede currently possess magnetic fields while Venus and Europa do not, and why Enceladus is geologically active whereas its neighbor Mimas remains dormant. To address these questions, Nimmo combines spacecraft observations with geophysical models, dedicating significant effort to studying icy bodies to determine their current state and history. For example, he explores how ridges on Europa, Triton, and Enceladus may result from tidal-driven back-and-forth motion, and how large extensional faults on Pluto could be caused by a refreezing ocean beneath its surface. As a member of four instrument teams on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, he is actively involved in advancing understanding of this intriguing moon through new observations. In addition to his work on icy satellites, Nimmo is interested in cosmochemical measurements of isotopes to elucidate the formation of terrestrial planets. He studies isotopes such as hafnium, which have decay times that reveal processes like core formation, and others like chromium, titanium, zinc, and molybdenum, which serve as passive tracers of the two distinct reservoirs from which all solar system materials originate. By combining…

Research topics

• Astrobiology
• Geophysics
• Geology
• Seismology
• Physics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Astronomy
• Acoustics
• Petrology

Selected publications

• Initial results from the InSight mission on Mars

  Nature Geoscience · 2020 · 447 citations

  DOI

• Constraints on the shallow elastic and anelastic structure of Mars from InSight seismic data

  Nature Geoscience · 2020 · 305 citations

  Mars’s seismic activity and noise have been monitored since January 2019 by the seismometer of the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander. At night, Mars is extremely quiet; seismic noise is about 500 times lower than Earth’s microseismic noise at periods between 4 s and 30 s. The recorded seismic noise increases during the day due to ground deformations induced by convective atmospheric vortices and ground-transferred wind-generated lander…

  DOI

• The seismicity of Mars

  Nature Geoscience · 2020 · 275 citations

  The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission landed in Elysium Planitia on Mars on 26 November 2018 and fully deployed its seismometer by the end of February 2019. The mission aims to detect, characterize and locate seismic activity on Mars, and to further constrain the internal structure, composition and dynamics of the planet. Here, we present seismometer data recorded until 30 September 2019, which reveal that Mars is seismically active.…

  DOI

• InSight Constraints on the Global Character of the Martian Crust

  Journal of Geophysical Research Planets · 2022 · 148 citations

  Abstract Analyses of seismic data from the InSight mission have provided the first in situ constraints on the thickness of the crust of Mars. These crustal thickness constraints are currently limited to beneath the lander that is located in the northern lowlands, and we use gravity and topography data to construct global crustal thickness models that satisfy the seismic data. These models consider a range of possible mantle and core density profiles, a range of crustal densities, a low‐density s…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Potential Pitfalls in the Analysis and Structural Interpretation of Seismic Data from the Mars <i>InSight</i> Mission

  Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America · 2021 · 56 citations

  sensors and spacecraft components. This work is to synthesize what is known about these signal types, illustrate how they can manifest in waveforms and noise correlations, and present pitfalls in structural interpretations based on standard seismic analysis methods. We show that glitches, a type of prominent transient signal, can produce artifacts in ambient noise correlations. Sustained signals that vary in frequency, such as lander modes which are affected by variations in temperature and wind…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• M. A. Wieczorek

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  93 shared

• R. A. Beyer

  Ames Research Center

  88 shared

• S. A. Stern

  Southwest Research Institute

  82 shared

• P. Schenk

  Lunar and Planetary Institute

  80 shared

• J. M. Moore

  Ames Research Center

  79 shared

• J. R. Spencer

  Southwest Research Institute

  77 shared

• L. A. Young

  Southwest Research Institute

  75 shared

• C. B. Olkin

  72 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz

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