- September 30, 2026
- By Georgia Jiang
A University of Maryland geophysicist helped adapt a technique initially built to track marsquakes for a new landscape: the moon.
While multiple seismometers have previously been used to triangulate and pinpoint shaking, Nicholas Schmerr, an associate professor in UMD’s Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, and colleagues at Imperial College London showed that just a single seismometer can do the job. The team published its findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 24.
The research can help inform planning for NASA’s upcoming Artemis III mission, which includes the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station. That tool (developed in part by Schmerr), NASA’s Farside Seismic Suite and instruments aboard China’s Chang’e 7 will land separately on the moon, where their seismometers will each work alone.
“This information is crucial for when we send crewed missions to the moon and establish a longer-term presence there,” he said. “Building an outpost in places where quakes occur or near where they occur is extremely dangerous. Knowing where these locations are will help missions weigh candidate landing sites to make sure our resources, equipment and astronauts are safe.”
The team started with the spent Saturn V booster stages that Apollo missions of the 1970s deliberately crashed into the moon. Those are the only moonquakes ever recorded.
The researchers then used the technique developed to locate marsquakes for NASA’s InSight lander, which operated alone on Mars’ surface from 2018 to 2022: By reading the direction and steepness of the first seismic wave and combining that with the delay between two wave types, the researchers correctly identified the impact sites a half-century ago—and correctly placed them at the surface, where they belonged.
The team then applied the technique to dozens of real events: genuine moonquakes and meteorite strikes, whose sources nobody knew in advance. One station could reasonably match the locations that had taken the full Apollo network to establish. What determined success was not the moon’s shattered crust but simply whether a tremor stood out clearly from the background instrument noise. That is encouraging for future Artemis missions, which will carry updated, more sensitive instruments than Apollo’s.
The team also re-examined the largest recently identified moonquake near the lunar south pole, close to potential Artemis landing sites. Their analysis places that quake tens of kilometers down, within the lunar crust, rather than at or just below the surface.