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Lunar Seismology: An Update on Interior Structure Models

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Abstract

An international team of researchers gathered, with the support of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), (1) to review seismological investigations of the lunar interior from the Apollo-era and up until the present and (2) to re-assess our level of knowledge and uncertainty on the interior structure of the Moon. A companion paper (Nunn et al. in Space Sci. Rev., submitted) reviews and discusses the Apollo lunar seismic data with the aim of creating a new reference seismic data set for future use by the community. In this study, we first review information pertinent to the interior of the Moon that has become available since the Apollo lunar landings, particularly in the past ten years, from orbiting spacecraft, continuing measurements, modeling studies, and laboratory experiments. Following this, we discuss and compare a set of recent published models of the lunar interior, including a detailed review of attenuation and scattering properties of the Moon. Common features and discrepancies between models and moonquake locations provide a first estimate of the error bars on the various seismic parameters. Eventually, to assess the influence of model parameterisation and error propagation on inverted seismic velocity models, an inversion test is presented where three different parameterisations are considered. For this purpose, we employ the travel time data set gathered in our companion paper (Nunn et al. in Space Sci. Rev., submitted). The error bars of the inverted seismic velocity models demonstrate that the Apollo lunar seismic data mainly constrain the upper- and mid-mantle structure to a depth of ∼1200 km. While variable, there is some indication for an upper mantle low-velocity zone (depth range 100–250 km), which is compatible with a temperature gradient around 1.7 ∘C/km. This upper mantle thermal gradient could be related to the presence of the thermally anomalous region known as the Procellarum Kreep Terrane, which contains a large amount of heat producing elements.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge ISSI Bern and ISSI Beijing for providing support to our international research team. This work was granted access to the HPC resources of CINES under the allocation A0050407341 made by GENCI. Internal structure models and quake locations presented in this study are available in electronic form at the following https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3372489.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO), Université de Toulouse, 10 Ave E. Belin, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Raphael F. Garcia

  2. Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, C.N.R.S., Université de Toulouse, 14 Ave E. Belin, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Raphael F. Garcia & Ludovic Margerin

  3. Institute of Geophysics, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Amir Khan

  4. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Université de Paris, CNRS, 75005, Paris, France

    Mélanie Drilleau, Taichi Kawamura & Philippe Lognonné

  5. Laboratory of Seismology and Physics of Earth’s Interior, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Daoyuan Sun

  6. CAS Center for Excellence in Comparative Planetology, Hefei, China

    Daoyuan Sun

  7. Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France

    Mark A. Wieczorek

  8. Observatoire Royal de Belgique, 3 Avenue Circulaire, 1050, Bruxelles, Belgium

    Attilio Rivoldini

  9. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

    Ceri Nunn

  10. Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany

    Ceri Nunn

  11. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, USA

    Renee C. Weber

  12. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Angela G. Marusiak

  13. Institute for Geophysics, John A. and Katherine G. Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Yosio Nakamura

  14. China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

    Peimin Zhu

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Appendices

Appendices

1.1 A.1 Appendix

This appendix provides the numerical values of the median of internal structure model distributions of M1, M2, and M3 inversions.

Table 11 Seismic velocity (in km/s) and density (in g/cm−3) models as a function of depth (in km) extracted from M1, M2 and M3 inversions. M1 and M2 models show the median values of the distributions, as well as the \(1\sigma \) uncertainties. For M3 the best misfit model is shown
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Garcia, R.F., Khan, A., Drilleau, M. et al. Lunar Seismology: An Update on Interior Structure Models. Space Sci Rev 215, 50 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-019-0613-y

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