It’s been more than 50 years since the United States landed on the moon for its seventh lunar mission.
This week, a new study published in the journal of Advancing Earth and Space Sciences used eight months of seismologial data collected between 1976 to 1977 from equipment left during the Apollo 17 mission, to find unnatural moonquakes. Researchers believe the lunar lander left by the mission is causing the moon to quake.
“We found the impulsive moonquakes are not due to natural processes,” the authors wrote in the study, “but are vibrations generated form the lunar module descent vehicle left by the astronauts in 1972.”
Because the lunar lander heats and cools with the extreme temperatures, ranging form -208 degrees Fahrenheit to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, the crust rumbles as it adjusts to a new temperature. Researchers found that the lunar lander adjusting to the extreme temperatures would shake the ground.
“Every lunar morning when the sun hits the lander, it starts popping off,” said study coauthor Allen Husker, a research professor of geophysics at Caltech, per CNN. “Every five to six minutes (there was) another one, over a period of five to seven Earth hours. They were incredibly regular and repeating.”
