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Investigating Subsurface Properties of the Shallow Lunar Crust using Seismic Interferometry on Synthetic and Recorded Data
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  • Sabrina Keil,
  • Heiner Igel,
  • Martin Schimmel,
  • Fabian Lindner,
  • Felix Bernauer
Sabrina Keil
Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Heiner Igel
Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich
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Martin Schimmel
Geosciences Barcelona
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Fabian Lindner
Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich
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Felix Bernauer
Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich
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Abstract

In the past few years, the remarkable progress of commercially operated spacecrafts, the success with reusable rocket engines, as well as the international competition to explore space, has led to a substantial acceleration of activities in the design and preparation of ambitious future lunar missions. In the search for ice and/or cavities imaging the shallow subsurface structure is of vital importance. Hereby, previous studies have shown that seismic interferometry is a promising method to investigate the subsurface properties from passive lunar data. In this study, we want to evaluate the potential of this method further by examining the required duration of seismic measurements and the influence of scattering on the Green´s function retrieval. Therefore, we applied seismic interferometry to both measured Apollo 17 data and synthetic data. Our findings indicate that, under optimal conditions, a few hours of data are sufficient when using the method of time-scaled phase-weighted stack (ts-PWS). However, this strongly depends on the inter-station distance, the orientation towards the principal noise sources, and the timing of the measurement during the lunar cycle. Additionally, we were able to reproduce the measured data using numerical simulations in 2D. The synthetic results show that scattering effects clearly influence the Green´s function extraction, especially for larger station distances.