Monday, March 13, 2023

Planning the first Farside Observatory

 There is a particularly fantastic piece of real estate for locating a radio telescope that's not that far away...in space terms.

It's the other side of the moon.

One of the biggest issues with Earth-based radio telescopes is interference from all the things on Earth which produce radio waves. Like, say, the break room microwave.

If you put it on the other side of the moon, then there's a lot of rock between it and all of those things. And in late 2025 we're going to try it.

It's called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) and will hopefully land on the far side of the moon and start to gather data we can't get through the normal interference...direct data on the early universe before stars existed. LuSEE-Night is a pathfinder mission, a proof of concept to demonstrate whether or not a farside observatory really will work.

I believe it will.

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