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During the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 and the Apollo mission in 1972, astronauts buried platinum thermometers at different depths of the lunar ground. The goal was to see how heat was flowing from the moon's interior to the surface, which would help scientists learn more about central and internal geological activity. However, thermometers unexpectedly reported a gradual increase in temperature from 1.5 to 3.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists could not identify exactly why. They were able to remove the sun and the power generators from the thermometer. But there were other possibilities, such as fluctuations in the moon's orbit, the Earth's radiation, or perhaps a lasting effect on the part of the astronauts. But we knew who, because we were missing crucial data.
Each of these probes transmitted temperature data for years. The data was recorded on 7-track magnetic tapes, which were then analyzed and archived. But when the experiment ended in 1977, only the tapes until 1974 were analyzed and stored. The rest from 1975 to 1977 was lost and it was not until 2010 that NASA started looking for old data from Apollo and other programs.
The researchers found that 440 of them had somehow been found at the Washington National Records Center. 440 tapes seem a lot, but that's less than 10% of the missing data, and what was found was very degraded. In another stroke of luck, they found weekly logs of probe temperatures during the missing years at the Houston Lunar and Planetary Institute.
So after eight years of research and analysis, they finally had all the pieces of the puzzle.
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