Marc S. Boxberg

• Dr. rer. nat.
• Deputy Head of Geophysical Imaging and Monitoring at RWTH Aachen University

Ice-covered ocean worlds, such as the Jovian moon Europa, are some of the prime targets for planetary exploration due to their high astrobiological potential. While upcoming space exploration missions, such as the Europa Clipper and JUICE missions, will give us further insight into the local cryoenvironment, any conclusive life detection investigat...

The exploration of icy environments in the solar system, such as the poles of Mars and the icy moons (a.k.a. ocean worlds), is a key aspect for understanding their astrobiological potential as well as for extraterrestrial resource inspection. On these worlds, ice melting probes are considered to be well suited for the robotic clean execution of suc...

Modelling the propagation of seismic waves in porous media gets more and more popular in the seismological community. The fluid content of, for example, reservoir rocks or soils, and the interaction between the fluids and the rock has to be taken into account to accurately describe seismic wave propagation through such porous media. The aim of this...

Geophysical methods are widely used to gather information about the subsurface as they are non-intrusive and comparably cheap. However, the solution to the geophysical inverse problem is inherently non-unique, which introduces considerable uncertainties. As a partial remedy to this problem, independently acquired geophysical data sets can be jointl...

Icy bodies with subsurface oceans are a prime target for astrobiology investigations, with an increasing number of scientists participating in the planning, development, and realization of space missions to these worlds. Within Germany, the Ocean Worlds and Icy Moons working group of the German Astrobiology Society provides an invaluable platform f...

Magnetic total field data were collected on a meadow close to the volcano Rockeskyller Kopf near Reckeskyll, West Eifel, Germany. The data were obtained with the proton magnetometer ENVI-MAG (Scintrex) and a laser tachymeter was used to determine the exact position of the measurement points. The measurements were carried out on four different days...

The Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE mbH) is tasked with the selection of a site for a high-level radioactive waste repository in Germany in accordance with the Repository Site Selection Act. In September 2020, 90 areas with favorable geological conditions were identified as part of step 1 in phase 1 of the Site Selection Act. Re...

Melting probes are a proven tool for the exploration of thick ice layers and clean sampling of subglacial water on Earth. Their compact size and ease of operation also make them a key technology for the future exploration of icy moons in our Solar System, most prominently Europa and Enceladus. For both mission planning and hardware engineering, met...

Providing measurements for scientific simulation software often requires tedious manual preprocessing of data sets. To overcome this problem and make it easy for simulation tools to access heterogeneous data sets directly, we have developed the Ice Data Hub. The Ice Data Hub combines available data from Earth or other planetary bodies including the...

This dataset was acquired at field tests of the steerable ice-melting probe "EnEx-IceMole" (Dachwald et al., 2014). A field test in summer 2014 was used to test the melting probe's system, before the probe was shipped to Antarctica, where, in international cooperation with the MIDGE project, the objective of a sampling mission in the southern hemis...

In geodisciplines such as the cryosphere sciences, a large variety of data is available in data repositories provided on platforms such as Pangaea. In addition, many computational process models exist that capture various physical, geochemical, or biological processes at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and provide corresponding simulati...

The icy moons of our Solar System, such as the Saturnian moon Enceladus and the Jovian moon Europa, are scientifically highly interesting targets for future space missions, since they are potentially hosting extraterrestrial life in their oceans below an icy crust. Moreover, the exploration of these icy moons will enhance our understanding of the e...

Modelling the propagation of seismic waves in porous media gets more and more popular in the seismological community since it is an important but challenging task in the field of computational seismology. The fluid content of, for example, reservoir rocks or soils, and the interaction between the fluid and the rock or between different immiscible f...

The ocean worlds of our Solar System, like Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa are covered with ice. Recently, these icy moons gained further scientific interest, as they are attributed some potential to sustain or host extraterrestrial life in a subglacial ocean. The investigation of these moons will also help to understand the evolu...

NEXD is an open source software package for the simulation of seismic waves in complex geological media. This includes elastic, viscoelastic, porous and fractured media with complex geometries. For the computation of the wave fields, the nodal discontinuous Galerkin approach (NDG) is used. The NDG approach combines unstructured tetrahedral meshes w...

Determining elastic wave velocities and intrinsic attenuation of cylindrical rock samples by transmission of ultrasound signals appears to be a simple experimental task, which is performed routinely in a range of geoscientific and engineering applications requiring characterization of rocks in field and laboratory. P- and S-wave velocities are gene...

In December 2018, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission deployed a seismometer on the surface of Mars. In preparation for the data analysis, in July 2017, the marsquake service initiated a blind test in which participants were asked to...

A nodal discontinuous Galerkin approach (NDG) is developed and implemented for the computation of viscoelastic wave fields in complex geological media. The NDG approach combines unstructured tetrahedral meshes with an element-wise, high-order spatial interpolation of the wave field based on Lagrange polynomials. Numerical fluxes are computed from a...

We present a nodal discontinuous Galerkin scheme for solving the poroelastic wave equation for materials saturated by one or two immiscible fluids. The presented wave equation is based on Biot’s theory and accounts for macroscopic flow. Using an example of a numerical simulation we show the existence of the third P-wave. The velocity and amplitude...

Numerical simulations are a key tool to improve the knowledge of the interior of the earth. For example, global simulations of seismic waves excited by earthquakes are essential to infer the velocity structure within the earth. Numerical investigations on local scales can be helpful to find and characterize oil and gas reservoirs. Moreover, simulat...

When it comes to geological storage of CO2, monitoring is crucial to detect leakage in the caprock. In our study, we investigated the wave speeds of porous media filled with CO2 and water in order to determine reservoir changes. We focused on deep storage sites where CO2 is in a supercritical state. In case of a leak, CO2 rises and eventually start...