A UMD geophysicist helped adapt a technique built to track marsquakes for NASA’s InSight mission, turning it on the moon.
Finding an earthquake’s source is a matter of triangulation: Seismometers record the same shaking at slightly different times, and those differences reveal where the quake began. The method underpins every seismic network on Earth—and, in the 1970s, helped four Apollo stations map moonquakes and transform our understanding of the moon.
But the seismometers soon headed to the moon won’t work that way. The three systems—the Farside Seismic Suite, the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS) planned for Artemis III and instruments aboard China’s Chang’e 7—will land separately and are unlikely to operate simultaneously. Unable to form a network like Apollo’s stations, each will have to work alone, detecting moonquakes from signals weakened and scattered by the moon’s exceptionally dry, fractured crust.
In a new study, geophysicists at the University of Maryland and Imperial College London showed that just a single seismometer can be enough. To prove it, they needed moonquakes to practice on—and the only ones ever recorded are the ones Apollo captured. Those tapes remain the sole long-duration seismic record humanity has from the moon, and the only way to test a method before new instruments reach the lunar surface. Using a technique developed to locate marsquakes for NASA’s InSight lander, which operated alone on Mars’ surface from 2018 to 2022, the team pinpointed where moonquakes and meteorite strikes had occurred using recordings made over half a century ago. The team published its findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on August 24, 2026.
“We spent years creating a way to squeeze data out of InSight, the only instrument we had on Mars,” said Nicholas Schmerr, an associate professor in UMD’s Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and a co-author of the paper. “Now, we’re turning that toolkit from Mars to the moon and using historical data from Apollo to prepare for future Artemis missions. What NASA invests in one mission does not stop paying out when the mission ends.”
To test the accuracy of the adapted method, the team started with historic events whose locations were already known: the spent Saturn V booster stages that Apollo missions deliberately crashed into the moon. 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—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.
“This information is crucial for when we send crewed missions to the moon and establish a longer-term presence there,” Schmerr 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.”
For Schmerr, who helped develop and is deputy principal investigator of the LEMS project, that discovery is crucial.
“We’ve been planning around that moonquake without really the exact numbers, but now we have more concrete data about it,” Schmerr explained. “LEMS is going to be sitting at the south pole on its own, but we will still be able to pinpoint where events are happening on the moon.”
The Apollo instruments have been silent since 1977. Similarly, the InSight lander stopped transmitting from Mars in 2022. The team’s results suggest that such archival data, and the missions now being built to succeed them, have more stories to tell.
“Apollo left us 50 years of data and a stack of unanswered questions, and InSight retired a few years ago with data we’re still sorting through,” Schmerr said. “These missions may have ended, but their science—what we’re learning and discovering from them—hasn’t.”
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The paper, “Locating Moonquakes With Single Station Seismology,” was published in Geophysical Research Letters on August 24, 2026.
This research was supported by the UK Space Agency (Award No. UKRI2635); the National Research Foundation of Korea, funded by the Ministry of Education (Award No. RS-2025-02373070); and NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute through the GEODES node (Award No. 80NSSC19M0216). This article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.
