NASA borrows parts from Mars mission to put an earthquake detector on the Moon

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NASA’s InSight Mars mission is nearing completion, and while it has never successfully powered the penetrating heat probe, InSight is still a huge success thanks to its pioneering seismometer. Now, the first working seismometer on another planet is making history again. Spare parts from the Internal Structure Seismic Experiment (SEIS) will form the basis of a seismic instrument that will make its way to the far side of the Moon in 2025.

SEIS was designed and developed by the Institute of International Physics in Paris (IPGP) and the French space agency CNES. Work began in the 1990s, and eventually the project was selected to fly aboard InSight, which reached Mars in 2018. As part of the development process, engineers built a refined seismometer still on Earth. Parts of this instrument will be integrated into the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) that NASA plans to deploy to Schrödinger crater on the far side of the moon.

SEIS (above) features three ultra-sensitive pendulums spaced 120°, allowing it to detect movement in any direction less than 10 picometers. This is smaller than the width of one atom. This incredible accuracy has allowed NASA to record hundreds of Martian earthquakes, far more than scientists expected to detect. For the FSS, one of SEIS’s standby detectors will become the mission’s Very Wide Band Seismometer (VBB), which will measure vertical ground vibrations. A second instrument known as the Short Range Seismometer (SPS) will monitor movement in other directions.

The SEIS instruments already in place were a good match for the proposed lunar application, according to Gabriel Pont, who directs the FSS project at CNES. “The seismometer on the Persian wing will be tuned for lunar gravity. It will be housed in a vacuum protection case called a seismobox. The team expects the 40-kilogram FSS lander to have a sensitivity similar to SEIS on Mars, making it even better,” Pont told Ars Technica. About 10 times the last seismometers deployed on the Moon during the Apollo program.

NASA has awarded a contract to move the Farside Seismic Suite to Draper Laboratory. The probe (see above) is just a means of getting the FSS to the surface. The instrumentation will be independent of the lander with its solar panels, communications and heaters. To save power, the FSS will not transmit data during the lunar night, but will connect to an orbiting vehicle while in sunlight to upload the data. NASA is paying Draper $73 million for this landing under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which is currently set for May 2025.

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