Farside seismic suite prepared for testing in JPL clean room

In a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in March 2024, engineers and technicians prepare the agency’s Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) for testing.

The cube-shaped payload contains two instruments that will gather NASA’s first seismic data on the Moon in nearly 50 years and take the first-ever seismic measurements from the far side of the Moon. The FSS will operate continuously for at least 4 1/2 months, working through the long, cold lunar nights.

Here, engineers move the FSS onto a mount that will allow them to tilt the payload, simulating the pull of lunar gravity in the direction in which one of the instrument’s two seismometers is sensitive to movement. (The Moon’s gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth.) Called ambient tilt testing, this activity allows engineers to check the performance of seismometers.

The two seismometers are packaged with a large battery, computer and electronic components inside a cubic structure surrounded by several layers of insulation and suspended in an outer protective cube, itself covered with an insulating blanket brilliant. The suite’s only solar panel is visible to the right of center.

Surrounding the instrument are (left to right): Nik Schwarz, Vik Singh, Joanna Farias and Bert Turney.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages, designed, assembled and tested Farside Seismic Suite. The French space agency, CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales) and IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris) provided the suite’s very high-speed seismometer with the support of Paris Cité University and of the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). Imperial College London and the University of Oxford collaborated to provide the Short Period sensor, run by Kinemetrics in Pasadena. The University of Michigan provided the flight computer, power electronics and associated software.

A selection of NASA’s PRISM (Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon), the FSS is funded by the Office of Exploration Science Strategy and Integration within the NASA Science Mission Directorate. ‘agency. The Planetary Mission Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the program. The FSS will land on the Moon as part of an upcoming lunar delivery under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.