SRON develops, together with Dutch design houses Xensor Integration and Axiom-IC, a mixed-signal Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) which goes under the name SHAMROC. The acronym stands for SEIS High Accuracy Mixed-signal Read-out Chip. This ASIC is part of the read-out electronics for the SEIS seismometer, an instrument under development for the Exomars mission to Mars as part of ESA’s Aurora Program. When the seismometer is successfully deployed on the Martian surface in ~2017, it will provide the first seismic data ever recorded from the red planet. Main scientific issues to be addressed using the seismometer data are the amount of intrinsic seismic activity, the size and state of the planet’s core, the crustal thickness at the landing site, and the local meteorite flux.

The SHAMROC ASIC will acquire the science output from two types of seismometers, covering a total seismic frequency of 10^-5 –100Hz. This functionality in essence involves high resolution data conversion from the analogue to the digital domain, with a dynamic range of at least 22 bits. In addition SHAMROC will convert correction signals from the digital to the analogue domain, which are used to correct the seismometer for the effects of large temperature fluctuations.

The SEIS seismometer is being developed by a European team, including France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Principal Investigator of the instrument is Prof. Lognonné of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France. The acquisition electronics for the instrument and deployment system is developed at the Technical University of Zürich, ETHZ.

The project receives national funding via the Netherlands Space Office (NSO, former NIVR).