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Reflection imaging of the Moon's interior using deep‐moonquake seismic interferometry
Author(s) -
Nishitsuji Yohei,
Rowe C. A.,
Wapenaar Kees,
Draganov Deyan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: planets
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9100
pISSN - 2169-9097
DOI - 10.1002/2015je004975
Subject(s) - geology , seismology , interferometry , reflection (computer programming) , passive seismic , geophysical imaging , geodesy , offset (computer science) , geophysics , remote sensing , optics , physics , computer science , programming language
The internal structure of the Moon has been investigated over many years using a variety of seismic methods, such as travel time analysis, receiver functions, and tomography. Here we propose to apply body‐wave seismic interferometry to deep moonquakes in order to retrieve zero‐offset reflection responses (and thus images) beneath the Apollo stations on the nearside of the Moon from virtual sources colocated with the stations. This method is called deep‐moonquake seismic interferometry (DMSI). Our results show a laterally coherent acoustic boundary around 50 km depth beneath all four Apollo stations. We interpret this boundary as the lunar seismic Moho. This depth agrees with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) SELenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) result and previous travel time analysis at the Apollo 12/14 sites. The deeper part of the image we obtain from DMSI shows laterally incoherent structures. Such lateral inhomogeneity we interpret as representing a zone characterized by strong scattering and constant apparent seismic velocity at our resolution scale (0.2–2.0 Hz).