NASA is reaching out
NASA’s planning a piece of science equipment it calls the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope or LCRT. That’s exactly what it sounds like — a radio telescope build into a crater, only this one will live on the far side of the Moon. You know, the bit we never get to see from Earth?
So, first of all, it’ll face out into the universe and, secondly, it won’t have to contend with the planet’s atmosphere. Current radio ‘scopes battle with wavelengths longer than ten meters because of the planet’s ionosphere, explains the JPL’s Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay. He added, “[P]revious ideas of building a radio antenna on the Moon have been very resource intensive and complicated, so we were compelled to come up with something different.”