“I really thought we’d have one of these telescopes on the moon by now,” he says. “Was the expansion of the universe cooling this matter, or were objects like stars turning on and warming the matter up again?”īurns’s twin projects are the endpoint of more than 35 years of research, including an article he wrote for Scientific American in 1990 that laid out the obstacles to building a 10- to 15-meter lunar radio telescope at the time. “This is a very important part of the story of the thermal history of the universe,” agrees Mather. “We are going to use our radio telescopes like a particle detector to understand the kind of physics that was operating in this un-sampled time in the universe.” Well, the universe did that for us.’ Those particles are there from the Dark Ages and the Cosmic Dawn,” Burns says. “I like to tell my physics colleagues: ‘Imagine we have just built you a brand new high-energy particle accelerator, and it’s bigger than anything we could ever imagine. The wavelengths might also show if the neutral hydrogen that released the wave was warmer or colder than the cosmic microwave background released shortly after the Big Bang that information might reveal the role dark matter played in the happenings of the Dark Ages, and offer clues about what, exactly, dark matter is. The longer the neutral hydrogen wavelength, the farther back into time scientists know they’re looking. Solar panels to run the system could also be made onsite.īurns’ idea is to use arrays like these to create a map of specific areas of the universe during the Dark Ages. Another ten or so rovers would fabricate thin antennas out of that metal and then use an electrolysis technique to electroplate them onto the lunar surface. First, a team of automated rovers would gather up regolith and deliver it to a “factory” that could extract aluminum. But the plan isn’t just an upscaled version of FarSide. The base station would serve as a central processing center for the signal data picked up by the antennas, and would beam it to an alternative relay satellite orbiting the moon.įarView, a more ambitious program that’s been designed with the help of Houston-based Lunar Resources, Inc., would spread 100,000 dipole antennas across 400 square kilometers of the moon. A single lunar rover would handle the construction. FarSide would require a 590-kilogram base station and 128 pairs of antennas connected by a tether, which would be unspooled in the shape of four spiral arms across a 10-kilometer swath of the moon. To capture them, Burns’s FarSide and FarView proposals eschew a solid-aperture radio telescope (imagine the late Arecibo) in favor of a vast array of simple dipole antennas-much like the rabbit ears on your grandpa’s old TV. For incredibly long wavelengths, it’s a perfect port of call. On its far side, it blocks Earth’s radio signals. “There could be big surprises out there.” “We are absolutely completely ignorant about the radiation of the universe at long wavelengths that won’t go through our atmosphere,” says John Mather, a cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Nobel Laureate for his work studying the cosmic microwave background. “We care about those first stars because we care about our own origins-I mean, where did we come from? Where did the Sun come from? Where did the Earth come from? The Milky Way?” “With our telescopes on the moon, we can reverse-engineer the radio spectra that we record, and infer for the first time the properties of the very first stars,” said Jack Burns, a cosmologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the co-investigator and science lead for both FarSide and FarView. While they are still hypothetical, and years away from reality, the findings from these projects could reshape our cosmological model of the universe. The projects are all part of NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which awards innovators and entrepreneurs with funding to advance radical ideas in hopes of creating breakthrough aerospace concepts. Another duo of projects, called FarSide and FarView, would connect a vast array of antennas-eventually over 100,000, many built on the moon itself and made out of its surface material-to pick up the signals. One of the most ambitious proposals would build the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, the largest (by a lot) filled-aperture radio telescope dish in the universe. That’s why NASA is in the early stages of planning what it would take to build an automated research telescope on the far side of the moon. Because of our atmosphere and noisy radio signals generated by modern society, we can’t read them from Earth. For instance: Information about what happened long, long ago, contained in the long-length radio waves that are ubiquitous throughout the universe, likely hold the details about how the first stars and black holes were formed. The universe is constantly beaming its history to us.
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