Lunar Seismology

Abstract

The past 4 years have marked the beginning of a new era in lunar exploration. With the successful landing of instruments on the lunar surface by unmanned spacecrafts of the Luna, Ranger, and Surveyor series, and finally the first manned landing on the moon in July 1969, as part of the Apollo program, direct measurements of the physical and chemical properties of the moon have become a reality.Thus far we have had the opportunity to record data from two lunar seismic stations installed by the astronauts during Apollo missions 11 and 12 as part of an integrated set of geophysical experiments called ALSEP (Apollo lunar surface experiments package). The combined recording time from these stations was 13 months at the time of this writing, but there was no overlap in operation to permit recording the same event at two stations. Results from the analysis of these data have been presented by the seismic experiment team in six papers [Latham et al., 1969, 1970a, b, c, d; Ewing et al., 1970].