10,000 old tapes hold the secrets of what earthquakes look like in space: now we want to know more.
Somewhere in Maryland, there are 10,000 magnetic tapes stored in a warehouse. They are the archives of when we listened to the entrails of the Moon. And it is that between the years 1969 and 1977, Earth scientists received a continuous supply of seismological data from the satellite. Then the batteries began to fail, the seismographs fell silent, we lost interest, and we put everything in a drawer.
Until we seriously considered this live beyond the atmosphere and its surroundings. On the Moon, a normal earthquake can last for hours and no, there is no vital structure to support it. Above all, if a small break can compromise the integrity of the entire system.
The probe that NASA planted on Mars this week has a very accurate seismograph to help us compose a correct image of the red planet. But it is not easy to investigate blindly. That is how the tremors of the moon are having a new life.
Romance with the moon, moon
Because we are not talking about disjointed data, we are talking about a thorough search of every tremor (deep or shallow), every meteorite and every rocket that touched the moon between ’69 and ’77. It is a jewel of space exploration, one that we have frequently missed.
Thanks to these data series we can better understand Mars and also Earth because what we recorded there was silenceWithout the background noise of the sea, the atmosphere and humans, the Moon was a haven of peace, until boom! something was wrong. Something that, as Yosio Nakamura, a seismographer at the University of Texas, pointed out, was new: “the signals that were recorded on the Moon were nothing like those of earthquakes or explosions on Earth.”
Suspended nearly 400,000 kilometers from Earth, the Moon is a tuning fork, a cold, dry and rigid stone in the middle of space. There is nothing to dampen the tremors and therefore, even if the earthquake is not intense, it “goes on and on” without anything stopping it.
If the moon is the technological test bench To establish ourselves on Mars or beyond, we must understand what happens there and learn to solve the problems that we would have living there. So Nakamura and his team wanted to extract and format the data. It was the only way to answer questions about the inner life of the Moon and its formation and development.
Nakamura’s work has paid off. Michael Dumiak has made a good summary of how is that new scientific life of the Moon from 50 years ago: from the work of Ceri Nunn, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to refine the systems with which we measure the seismology of the Earth to that of Heiner Igel, from the University of Munich, who tries to understand surface changes thanks to to seismological information. If this is not reuse, let Sagan come down and see.
