It’s Time NASA Built A ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Telescope On The Moon—And It Has Four Astonishing Plans To Choose From

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 22:46:39 +0000

It’s Time NASA Built A ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Telescope On The Moon—And It Has Four Astonishing Plans To Choose From Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/28/2021 - 16:46

Jamie Carter

From Forbes: Let’s do astronomy from the Moon. Spurred on by the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the continuing degradation of the night sky by light pollution and the coming era of mega-constellations of satellites come four projects that seek to take astronomy to the Moon’s far side.

Lunar astronomy is an idea that’s been around since the 1960s, but new engineering and technology is at last making astronomy on the Moon a real possibility.

Why bother? About 240,000 miles/380,000 kilometers from Earth, observations can be made of low frequency radio in radio-quiet conditions and also in ultraviolet light—something blocked by Earth’s atmosphere—that could help reveal the unexplored early cosmos. And since it takes the Moon 27 days to orbit Earth, a telescope would be in darkness for half the month and able to observe the same object for almost two weeks at a time.

Astronomy has been done before both by Apollo astronauts and, since 2013, by China’s Chang-e rovers. Should NASA now commit to building the next big space observatory on the lunar surface? Read more...

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Could humanity’s return to the moon spark a new age of lunar telescopes?

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 23:22:18 +0000

Could humanity’s return to the moon spark a new age of lunar telescopes? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/18/2019 - 17:22

Daniel Clery

From Science: In the undulating, dust-covered Descartes Highlands, 380 kilometers southwest of Tranquility Base, where Apollo 11 landed half a century ago, a lonely gold-plated telescope has sat inert since 24 April 1972, when Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke blasted off the surface and left it behind. It was a small part of their 3-day mission, but a milestone for astronomers: the first observatory on another world.

The designer of the telescope was George Carruthers, a young researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., who had made his name building ultraviolet (UV) telescopes for sounding rockets, which make short flights above the UV-blocking atmosphere. A big question at the time was whether the hydrogen in interstellar gas clouds was made of individual atoms or molecules of hydrogen (H2). The answer lay in its UV spectrum, which is difficult to capture from a sounding rocket. Read more...

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Lunar Telescopes

It’s Time NASA Built A ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Telescope On The Moon—And It Has Four Astonishing Plans To Choose From

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Could humanity’s return to the moon spark a new age of lunar telescopes?

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