Apollo Lunar Surface
Experiment Package (ALSEP)
Passive Seismic Experiment
(PSE)
.
.
Apollo 16 PSE at Descartes (foreground). The central
station and RTG are in the background. Note the huge differences between
this and the Apollo 11 PSEP.
.
Apollo Experiment Number: S 031
Apollo missions: 12, 14, 15, and
16
Wt: 11.5 kg
Ht: 29 cm
Diam: 23 cm (not counting thermal
skirt)
The ALSEP PSE was one of only
a handful of experiments that was carried on almost all of the Apollo missions.
Apollo 11 carried the PSEP, which was basically
the same system in a self-powered configuration, and Apollo 17 did not
carry a PSE.
The purpose of this experiment
was to determine the interior structure of the moon through passive seismic
profiling, which is a fancy way of saying that the instrument detected
"moonquakes". These moonquakes were either natural or manmade. The manmade
variety came from several objects which were deliberately crashed into
the moon: the spent LM ascent stages and the Saturn V S-IVB stages. This
instrument was simple to deploy and is one of the more succesful of the
ALSEP experiments.
Go
back to ALSEP experiment index
Go
to next ALSEP experiment report
