Design, development and testing of MEMS based seismometer for space application

This paper presents a high performance space grade MEMS based Seismometer targeted for ground applications as well as for Chandrayaan-2 moon mission. Motivation of this paper is to develop a very light weight and high resolution seismometer using MEMS accelerometer sensor fabricated at LEOS-ISRO. It reports on the design and development of MEMS seismometer working on single power supply of +5V with a very small size of 50×32×6 mm
³
, weight of 30grams and very low power consumption of 10-15mW. MEMS accelerometer sensor and associated capacitive readout is realized in the form of HMC. Readout console is used for reading the acceleration data from the HMC and performing integration to extract velocity information. The functionality and performance of the full system was studied and tested on actual test-bed at NGRI (National Geophysics Research Institute) Measurements demonstrate that developed seismometer is having a good noise performance of 0.0007m/sec with a negligible non-linearity of 387 ppm over the frequency range of 0.01 to 20 Hz.