NASA Borrowing Parts From Mars Mission to Put an Earthquake Detector on the Moon

NASA’s InSight Mars mission is winding down, and while it never managed to get the burrowing heat probe to work, InSight is still a huge success thanks to its groundbreaking seismometer. Now, the first seismometer to operate on another planet is making history again. Spare parts from the Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure (SEIS) will form the basis for a seismic instrument that will make its way to the far side of the moon in 2025.

SEIS was designed and developed by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and the French CNES space agency. Work began back in the 90s, and eventually the project was chosen to fly on InSight, which reached Mars in 2018. As part of the development process, engineers built a duplicate seismometer that is still on Earth. Parts of this device 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) featured three ultra-sensitive pendulums spaced 120 degrees apart, allowing it to detect movement in any direction as little as 10 picometers. That’s smaller than the width of a single atom. This incredible precision allowed NASA to record hundreds of Marsquakes, far more than scientists expected to detect. For the FSS, one of the backup SEIS pendulums will become the Very Broad Band (VBB) seismometer for the mission, which will measure vertical ground vibrations. A second instrument known as the Short Period Seismometer (SPS) will monitor movement in other directions.

The existing SEIS hardware was already a good match for the proposed lunar application, according to Gabriel Pont, who manages the FSS project at CNES. “The Farside Seismic Suite seismometer will be tuned for lunar gravity. It will be placed in a vacuum protection case called seismobox,” Pont told Ars Technica. The team expects the 40-kilogram FSS lander to have similar sensitivity to SEIS on Mars, making it about 10 times better than the last seismometers deployed on the moon during the Apollo program.

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