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Lems-A3: The Lunar Environmental Monitoring Station—a Seismometer Station for the Moon Deployed by Artemis III Astronauts

The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station for Artemis III (LEMS-A3) was selected by NASA as a Deployed Instrument for the Artemis III (A3) mission and will be deployed in mid-2027 by astronauts near the lunar South Pole at the margin of the South Pole–Aitken basin (SPA). LEMS-A3 is a compact, autonomous, and self-sustaining seismometer suite designed to carry out continuous (day and night), long-term, monitoring of the lunar seismic environment at the South Polar region. The South Pole affords us the chance to study seismicity in highlands terrane and examine farside moonquakes, neither of which were detected in detail by Apollo seismometers. The three-month threshold mission and two-year baseline operation of LEMS-A3 will provide a new moonquake catalog that contains impacts, thermal, shallow, and deep moonquake activity. The detection and location of 3–4 high signal-to-noise moonquake events, together with the application of single-station data processing techniques developed and advanced during the InSight mission, will provide new information on the thickness of the lunar crust and properties of the mantle and core.

Once deployed on the surface and activated by the A3 crew, LEMS-A3 requires no support (power, thermal, commanding, or data) from the Human Landing System/Starship or the A3 crew to operate. The package has three elements: (a) a three-axis Short Period Seismometer (SP); (b) a complementary three-axis Broad Band Seismometer (BB); and (c) an Instrument Suite Platform (ISP) that provides data digitization and storage, power, thermal, and communication resources. Subsurface burial of the of the LEMS-A3 seismometers into the lunar regolith by the A3 crew will provide thermal stability, improved coupling to the ground, and reduced scattered seismic noise, all issues that plague surface-emplaced seismometer packages. LEMS-A3 is a technical demonstrator of a low-cost, self-sustaining, long-lived geophysical station at the Moon and could serve as the beginning of a global network of geophysical instruments, i.e., in coordination with the Farside Seismic Suite and/or a future Lunar Geophysical Network.

Session: Exploring Planetary Interiors and Seismology: Observations, Models, Experiments and Future Missions - I

Type: Oral

Room: Holiday Ballroom 1

Date: 4/17/2025

Presentation Time: 08:30 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Nicholas Schmerr

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: No

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Additional Authors