What's inside the moon? A fresh look at Apollo-era data offers clues. - Christian Science Monitor

Scientists have taken their first, vicarious journey to the center of the moon, thanks to a fresh look at 30-year-old moonquake data from the Apollo era.

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What the researchers found deep in the lunar interior: a solid iron ball 300 miles across, wrapped in molten iron another 56 miles thick, topped with a 93-mile layer of partially molten material.

The effort represents the first direct observation of the moon's core and the depths of its various layers, says Renee Weber, a lunar scientist at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who headed a international team of scientists on the project.

IN PICTURES: We love the moon

The notion that the moon has an iron core with a layer of molten iron surrounding it isn't new. But evidence so far has been indirect.

The new look confirms that picture. But also appears to be breathing new life into data once thought to be poorly suited for detailed studies of the deepest portions of the lunar interior.

"I think there's a lot more that can be done with these data," Dr. Weber says.

During the Apollo program, astronauts left four seismographs on the lunar surface. The instuments returned their last data to Earth in 1977, five years after the Apollo program ended.

The goal was to use seismic waves generated by moonquakes to probe the moon's structure, just as geologists on Earth use earthquakes to study Earth's interior structure and astrophysicists use acoustic waves from "star quakes" to study the interiors of stars.

But the heavy pummeling the moon has taken throughout its history has severely fractured the region between the crust and core, meaning that seismic waves were degraded, making them too difficult to interpret.

But new ways of analyzing less-than-ideal seismic data, developed for use on Earth, plus the rapid increase in computing power since the days of Apollo, prompted Weber and her collaborators to give the Apollo data a fresh look. The results were published Thursday afternoon on Science Express, the online adjunct to the journal Science.

The seismic data support the prevailing idea of how the moon formed, the researchers say: Gravity reassembled debris that was generated when an Earth-size object collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago.

Over the past few years, lunar missions have shown a moon far more complex and interesting than anyone expected a decade a go, lunar scientists say.

The ability to mine Apollo's data, along with future missions to plant more-modern seismographs on the moon, hold the potential to do the same for the moon's interior.

"There is much we don't know about the lunar interior," said Ed Garnero, a seismologist at Arizona State University and a member of the research team, in a statement. "That information is key to deciphering the origin and evolution of the moon, including the very early Earth."

IN PICTURES: We love the moon