Does this however imply that the moon is hollow? According to Walter Cunningham, who was the third civilian astronaut and was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 7 mission in 1968, with Apollo 12 people refer to it as a crash. It wasn't really a crash. It was an aimed de-orbit of the rocket used to lift off the lunar module, and the crew separated the launch vehicle and crashed it back into the ground, right close to where they had a seismograph that they had installed down there. Well, it vibrated, so it was an early clue as to how solid the surface of the moon is.
What was interesting about this was that the moon suddenly began to ring like a bell and continued to do so for over an hour. Dr. Werner von Braun, then director of NASA, decided that for Apollo 13, they would purposefully crash a larger part of the rocket into the lunar surface. When they performed this, the moon rang like a gong for more than three hours and to a depth of more than 20 miles. This was unexpected, and it continues to perplex many scientists today.
Because the moon is mostly formed on the surface of a rock called basalt, the assumption is that it must be hollow. Although it is a lightweight rock, it absorbs a lot of impact. Because of this, you wouldn't expect the moon to reverberate after a significant hit if the entire surface was formed of the same type of rock. The reason for this is that the idea of the moon being hollow contradicts everything we know about physics. But what causes the moon to ring like a bell?
Here's where things get lost in translation. The moon was ringing like a bell, Clive R. Neill, professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, says of the experiment results in a NASA write-up. And that's true from a scientific standpoint. Similarly, the write-up compares moonquake vibrations to those of a tuning fork, which is a type of acoustic resonator.