10. Moon Echoes: On November 20, 1969, the Apollo 12 crew jettisoned the lunar module ascent stage causing it to crash onto the moon. The LM’s impact (about 40 miles from the Apollo 12 landing site) created an artificial moonquake with startling characteristics—the moon reverberated like a bell for more than an hour.

I recently purchased a DVD set called The Apollo Collection which included the film 'Pinpoint for Science'. This film is all about the Apollo 12 mission, and it includes a section on the seismic experiments. An audio clip contains what I believe is the quote that this concept of the Moon ringing like a bell came from.

Someone (I can't recall who) was talking about the seismometer and how surprising the results were. He said someting like 'the result we obtained was rather like rapping on a bell, for example, and hearing the reverberations for about half an hour.'

That may not be the exact quote, but when I heard it I did not take it to mean the Moon was ringing like a bell in response to the impact of the Apollo 12 LM. To me it just seemed like someone trying to render the result in a form easily understood. To me the context suggests not that the Moon rang like a bell but merely that the vibrations were felt for longer than expected: this surprised the scientists monitoring the seisometer in the same way as you or I would be surprised if we rang a bell, however large it was, and we could still hear the note produced half an hour later. You would expect the noise to fade within seconds, or maybe a minute or two if there was absolute silence and it was a particularly fine bell.

Does anyone else share that interpretation of the original quote, or is it just me?

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.