Number of known moonquakes tripled with discovery in Apollo archive
https://www.science.org/content/article/number-known-moonquakes-tripled-discovery-apollo-archive
By PAUL VOOSEN, Science
Excerpt: THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS—The Moon suddenly seems more alive. From 1969 to 1977, seismometers left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts detected thousands of distinctive “moonquakes.” Now, half a century later, a new analysis has cut through the noise in the old data and nearly tripled the number of moonquakes, adding more than 22,000 new quakes to 13,000 previously identified ones.
Excerpt: THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS—The Moon suddenly seems more alive. From 1969 to 1977, seismometers left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts detected thousands of distinctive “moonquakes.” Now, half a century later, a new analysis has cut through the noise in the old data and nearly tripled the number of moonquakes, adding more than 22,000 new quakes to 13,000 previously identified ones.
The finding, presented last week here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, shows “that the Moon may be more seismically and tectonically active today than we had thought,” says Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a geophysicist at the University of Arizona unaffiliated with the work, which is in review at the Journal of Geophysical Research. “It is incredible that after 50 years we are still finding new surprises in the data.”