The Interior of the Moon

Kurzfassung

The earliest maps of the lunar surface date back to Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Harriot, and Galileo Galilei - the lack of atmosphere and oceans permit not only direct observation of the surface, but also measurements of topography, mineralogy, and geological analysis. The deep interior of the Moon however, beneath the excavations created by impacts and the extrapolation of surface geology, is far more elusive. Geophysical methods proven on Earth, in fields as separate as Earthquake research, petroleoum and ore prospection, and medicine, allow to investigate the interior of a planet down to its very core. Although recorded with technology of the 1960s, new results can be extracted from the Apollo data even 50 years after the first moon landing. The solid inner core of the Moon, as an example, was discovered in 2011. It is not an overstatement to say that almost everything we know about the deep interior of the Moon results from only seven Apollo missions to the Moon.