The Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 missions landed on the moon in the early 1970s, leaving instruments behind to measure moonquakes and the heat release of the interior.

Seiichi Nagihara, an associate professor in the Texas Tech U. Department of Geosciences, began working with the Goddard Space Flight Center after receiving a $45,000, two-year grant to research the missing data from the Apollo missions in the fall.

The devices sent data measured on the moon back to centers on Earth, but the receivers were turned off manually in 1977. After the United States was the first to land on the moon, the decreasing NASA budget caused the data research from the Apollo missions to be put on the back burner, he said.

“The data being beamed back to the Earth was kind of forgotten. Then, unfortunately, the main people and scientist who was analyzing the heat data from the moon died almost 10 years ago,” Nagihara said. “No one really knows what he did with the data.”

Some of the data has been analyzed and kept in the Goddard facility, but large periods of time are missing data, he said. The group’s job is to locate the data and research its meaning.

“The problem is for some reason NASA lost track of the data and that’s what we’re looking for,” said Professor Emeritus Yosio Nakamura, from U. Texas-Austin. “But we have some clues to find them.”

Nagihara said very little has been found so far; the group of researchers is trying to track down anyone who was involved with the research programs to see if they can help. The problem is the variations of people’s memories and recollections of events, making the data challenging to locate.

Documents and research left behind provide the group names of those originally involved before the group begins looking for a way to contact them, Nagihara said.

“We do one lead at a time until it gets cold, then just try another one,” he said. “We are basically acting as a detective right now.”

When the data was collected, there were no flash drives, CDs or floppy disks to keep the information; everything was stored on rolls of magnetic tapes. The tapes should have been sent to the scientist in charge of analyzing the data, but somehow they went missing.

Nagihara said people who were not responsible for researching the data might have sent them to other government storage facilities, which he said is normal.

Recently, the researchers discovered quite a bit of the data from the Goddard center was sent to a facility in Fort Worth. Although they do not know if it is the information they are looking for, Nagihara said they know it came from the Apollo missions.

When the data is found, Nagihara’s job will become more prominent. He works with analyzing the heat flow data to make sense of the information. An instrument has to physically be placed in the ground of the moon to gather the information. Since the Apollo missions, no new data has been collected because it requires sending people and equipment back to the moon.

His job is to determine how much heat actually is radiating from of the moon. Because the surface of the moon is heavily influenced by the sun, the days are drastically warmer than the evenings; Nagihara is now working on taking the sun’s influence out of the equation to get a better understanding of the heat flow of the moon.

After working with Nagihara during his graduate work, Nakamura said he thought Nagihara could benefit the project because of his background in geosciences and interest in the moon. He thinks it is important to get younger people involved because the United States might decide to go back to the moon.

“I think it’s good that young people are interested in these things,” he said.