THE moon is prone to more quakes than anyone realised. Reanalysis of seismic data recorded during the Apollo missions has revealed five times as many “deep moonquakes” as identified first time round.
Yosio Nakamura at the University of Texas at Austin took another look at data recorded by seismographs left on the moon between 1969 and 1972, during the Apollo missions. When researchers first analysed data from these instruments by hand, they identified 1360 deep moonquakes from 108 different sources.
In his analysis, Nakamura removed irregularities and noise from the original recordings before using a computer to find patterns caused…
