The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS): An Artemis III Deployed Instrument

 50+ years after the Apollo missions, NASA will be sending astronauts back to the Moon. This time, the astronauts will land near the South Pole of the Moon. The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS-A3) is one of the selected Artemis III Deployed Instruments. LEMS-A3 is built to operate independently of the Artemis III crew spacecraft, survive the lunar night and operate for at least two years. The LEMS-A3 payload is a set of astronaut-deployed seismometers, SeisLEMS, consisting of a broadband (BB) and short period (SP) instrument built by the University of Arizona and Silicon Audio Inc. Artemis astronauts will deploy and position LEMS-A3, and bury the BB and SP instruments into an astronaut dug-trench and borehole, respectively.
The BB and SP will continuously record ground motions at 100 samples per second (sps) and relay 15 sps data back to Earth once a month. The LEMS team will use the ground motions to detect and locate lunar seismic events including impact-driven, shallow, and deep moonquakes and iteratively backfill the events with 100 sps data. The proposed Artemis III landing sites all enable seismic surveys of the southern pole and farside of the Moon; geographic regions that have previously be unexplored with seismometers. Through seismic data interpretation we aim to catalog seismicity of the Moon, investigate the crustal and mantle structure of the south pole, determine the structure of the deep interior, and ascertain seismic hazards.
Although LEMS-A3 is designed as a stand-alone seismic station, it is possible that it may operate at the same time as other seismometers, e.g. the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) and other future lunar missions equipped with seismometers. If FSS and LEMS-A3 are operational at the same time, more science may be accomplished through collaboration of the science teams and shared datasets.