NASA would place a giant telescope at the far end of the Moon wiredprnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wiredprnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
May 19, 2021
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope has a proposed 1-km diameter (.6 mile), much larger in the moon’s low gravity than any earthly radio telescope. If completed, this telescope will be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in our solar system. Image via Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay/ NASA.
In late 2020, the beloved Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed and was decommissioned. It was a dish-type radio telescope, built into a natural depression in the landscape. Now, as the astronomy community mourns Arecibo’s loss, a team of scientists has just cleared another hurdle to building a much-larger radio telescope. In April 2021, NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts awarded the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope project $500,000 for further research and development. This telescope, too, is to be built into a natural depression in the landscape, in this case a bowl-shaped crater on the far side of the moon.
The European Space Agency Is Planning A Satellite Constellation Around The Moon iflscience.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from iflscience.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope is now moving into Phase 2 of development. It'll be built by robots, into a natural bowl-shaped crater on the moon's far side. If completed, it'll be the largest radio telescope in the solar system.
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.”