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Originally Posted by Michael Dumiak, IEEE Spectrum 28 November 2018

Astronauts planted seismometers on the moon long ago. Now, the data recorded there is producing new insights.

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Apollo astronauts placed the first of these instruments in 1969 on the Sea of Tranquility, a large lunar plain formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. These seismometers last sent signals earthbound in 1977. Now Ceri Nunn, a seismologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is working with colleagues to collect and clean up the decades-old data.

The idea is to collate this trove of information—which started life on 10,000 seven-track reel-to-reel magnetic tapes—into an easily downloaded and research-friendly format. Currently, copies of many of the tapes are accessible via the Japanese space agency JAXA’s website. The originals are stored at the National Space Science Data Center in Maryland, though some are at the University of Texas, and some may never have been archived.

The instruments recorded wave signals showing deep and shallow tremor, meteor, and spent-rocket impacts on the moon. “These data should be preserved for everybody to use in the future,” Nunn says. “Normally with an experiment that’s 50 years old, nobody would be that excited about revisiting it.”

It has already taken remarkable effort to keep this data intact for so long. And, remarkably, researchers keep teasing discoveries from it. In one example, lunar seismic events recorded at the time lay dormant in the data, unseen for decades. In another, NASA researchers looked back to the legacy data to fill in new details about the lunar core.

Story here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/...-seismologists