The renewed global interest in lunar exploration presents exciting opportunities for deploying novel scientific instrumentation. Since the Apollo missions, seismic data have proven invaluable for probing the Moon’s internal structure and geologic history. Seismology has not only deepened our understanding of the Moon’s crust and mantle but also highlighted the potential for discovering subsurface voids, such as lava tubes, that may offer shelter for future human missions. The advent of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which transforms fiber-optic cables into dense seismic arrays, has revolutionized terrestrial geoscience applications, from glacier monitoring to high-resolution subsurface imaging. In this talk, I will review key findings from past lunar seismology efforts and explore how DAS could enable a new era of planetary exploration. I will also discuss the unique technical and environmental challenges of implementing DAS on the lunar surface, from thermal extremes to coupling and fiber deployment logistics.

Ettore Biondi is a geophysicist specializing in fiber sensing technologies and dense seismic sensor networks to study earthquakes, volcanoes, and subsurface structures. He earned a B.Sc. in Geology from the University of Genoa (2010), an M.Sc. in Geophysics from the University of Pisa (2012), and a diploma in Computational Chemistry from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (2013). After a research position in Italy at the University of Milan, he completed his Ph.D. in Geophysics at Stanford University in 2021. He then joined the Caltech Seismological Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher before working with the Southern California Seismic Network on earthquake early warning systems using distributed acoustic sensing as a research scientist since January 2023. In July 2025, he will return to Stanford as an Assistant Professor in the Geophysics Department.