Farside Seismic Suite

Arriving at Schrödinger basin via a lunar lander as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, FSS will record the agency’s first seismic data from the Moon since the Apollo missions nearly 50 years ago.

The solar-powered suite’s vertical Very Broadband (VBB) seismometer, contributed by the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), was originally constructed as a flight spare for NASA’s InSight Mars lander. The most sensitive seismometer ever built for use in space exploration, the VBB can detect ground motions smaller than the size of a single hydrogen atom. The Short Period (SP) sensor on FSS, based on a design used on InSight, was built by Kinemetrics in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Imperial College, London. The SP is the most sensitive and mature compact triaxial sensor available for space applications.

Using a cube-within-a-cube design, FSS is packaged as a self-sufficient payload, with independent power, communications, and thermal control to enable survival through the Moon’s frigid nights and searing days. It will operate for at least 4½ months, providing a long-lived seismic experiment capable of answering key scientific questions.

Data from FSS will help define the interior structure of the Moon, information critical to understanding how rocky planetary bodies are formed. It will help scientists explain why Apollo data showed few quakes on the far side of the Moon, determining the differences between near-side and far-side seismic activity. And the suite will record the Moon’s seismic “background” vibration, which is driven by micrometeorite impacts. That will help determine how often these tiny rocks strike the surface — a key insight as NASA prepares to send Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface.