Long-Duration Acoustic Monitoring of Stable Subsurface Habitats

Long-duration acoustic monitoring of a subsurface lunar habitat needs a quilt that survives 400 sols of regolith dust, thermal stability, and slow drift in sensor response.

A subsurface lunar habitat is valuable precisely because it is boring. The Springer Space Science Reviews survey of lava tubes detection, evolution, exploration potential spells out why: a stable thermal and radiation profile is exactly the asset a long-duration habitat needs. The IOPscience paper on radiation dose protection in a lava tube quantifies the shielding — 5 m of regolith cuts the effective dose below 50 mSv per year, which pushes a lunar habitat into the regime where long-duration human presence becomes plausible. The MDPI Applied Sciences paper on utilisation of Moon regolith for radiation protection and thermal insulation documents the thermal insulation performance that makes the same volume survivable through the lunar night.