Left-over Apollo Tech is Causing Moonquakes on the Lunar Surface

upstart writes:

Fresh analysis of data from the 1970s has revealed that, when hit by the morning sun each day, the base of the Apollo 17 lander "starts popping off":

When NASA astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission departed the lunar surface on December 14, 1972, they left a few things behind - including a US flag, a Moon buggy, and the lunar module's descent stage.

A new study by researchers from the California University of Technology has revealed that the latter regularly causes extra, tiny "moonquakes" which shake the lunar surface.

This finding comes, ironically, thanks to another thing Cernan and Schmitt left near their landing site - an array of four geophones used to conduct seismic experiments.

Reactivated between October 1976 and May 1977 for passive listening, these seismometers recorded thousands of subtle tremors on the Moon, the result of daily temperature variations.

Until now, however, the poor quality of the data had made a comprehensive analysis difficult - hiding the fact that some of the moonquakes were not quite what they initially seemed.

[...] In their study, geophysicist Professor Allen Husker of the California University of Technology and his colleagues used techniques not available in the seventies - like machine learning - to clean up the Apollo 17 passive seismic data and undertake a more robust analysis.

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