Abstract Moonquake recordings are key to understanding the Moon's internal structure, yet existing data from the Apollo missions are limited. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) offers a promising alternative to conventional seismometers for future lunar seismic monitoring, particularly due to its robustness and suitability for high‐scattering environments like the lunar regolith. Since burial of DAS cables may be impractical on the Moon, understanding the coupling performance of unburied cables is critical. In this study, we present experimental results from controlled shaker tests in a lunar regolith simulant, comparing the coupling performance of buried and unburied fiber‐optic cables with varying mechanical properties and assessing the impact of wind noise and surface undulations. Our findings show that burial generally improves signal amplitude and phase reliability, while unburied cables yield weaker signals and, in some cases, exhibit phase shifts. However, thicker and stiffer unburied cables achieve comparable performance as buried cables, maintaining stable amplitude ratios and phases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that free‐hanging cable segments degrade coupling quality substantially for all tested cables, emphasizing the importance of continuous ground contact. We also show that wind appears to be a major contributor to poor signal quality in unburied DAS deployments on Earth—an issue that would not arise on the Moon due to its lack of atmosphere. These results suggest that with appropriate cable selection and deployment strategies, unburied DAS is a viable option for lunar seismic applications.
Probst et al. (Sun,) studied this question.