NASA Funds A Telescope Built Inside A Crater On The Moon's Dark Side That Will Help Us Look Into 13.8 Billion Years Ago

What you see in the image below is a proposed lunar telescope that’s built inside a crater on the dark side of the Moon. If it came to life, we could use this telescope to peer back into the cosmos’ earliest days.

Earlier this month, NASA awarded more funding to several projects in its NIAC program (Innovative Advanced Concepts). The program encourages contributors to come up with creative ideas to “change the possible.”

Some proposals are really interesting, such as a solution to explore the subsurface ocean on Europa, Jupiter’s moon, instant landing pads that can be used for the upcoming lunar mission Artemis, as well as an idea of using antimatter to slow down interstellar spacecraft on the way to exoplanet Proxima Centauri b.

Among the more interesting ideas is one from Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a JPL roboticist. He want s to build a telescope right in a natural crater on the Moon’s other side, which he calls the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT). The project has got a Phase 1 grant from NASA worth Rs 91.8 lakh. If Bandyopadhyay’s team comes up with a convincing proposal, they will be able to proceed to the second phase. That means there’s no telling if we will see an actual crater-telescope.

According to Bandyopadhyay, in Phase 1, the team is expected to study their concept’s feasibility.

“During Phase 1, we will mostly be focusing on the mechanical design of LCRT, searching for suitable craters on the Moon, and comparing the performance of LCRT against other ideas that have been proposed in the literature.”

He added that Phase 1 is done, they will have a better idea of when a structure could be built.

The idea for LCRT is an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope that can capture the weakest signals that travel through space. Bandyopadhyay said:

“It is not possible to observe the universe at wavelengths greater than 10 meters [33 feet], or frequencies below 30 MHz, from Earth-based stations, because these signals are reflected by the Earth’s ionosphere. Moreover, Earth-orbiting satellites would pick up significant noise from Earth’s ionosphere.”

This is the reason why wavelengths larger than 10 meters haven’t been explored yet. Therefore, LCRT would be very helpful for cosmologists and astronomers in studying the early universe that existed 13.8 billion years ago, along with how the earliest stars formed.

When the telescope is placed on the dark side of the Moon, the observatory wouldn’t be interfered with by radio waves or other annoyances from Earth, artificial or natural.

“The Moon acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar-surface telescope from radio interferences/noises from Earth-based sources, ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and the Sun’s radio-noise during the lunar night.”

LCRT would be built inside a crater measuring 3-5 kilometers in diameter. In the crater, various DuAxel robots would string up, then suspend and anchor a mesh that measures 1 km in diameter, making it the telescope with the largest filled-aperture in the Solar System.

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