听From WIRED: THE UNIVERSE IS听constantly beaming its history to us. For instance: Information about what happened long,听long听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. There鈥檚 a problem, though. Because of our atmosphere and noisy radio signals generated by modern society, we can鈥檛 read them from Earth.
That鈥檚 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. One of the most ambitious proposals would build the听Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, the largest (by a lot) filled-aperture radio telescope dish in the universe. Another duo of projects, called听FarSide听and听FarView, would connect a vast array of antennas鈥攅ventually over 100,000, many built on the moon itself and made out of its surface material鈥攖o pick up the signals. The projects are all part of NASA鈥檚 Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which awards innovators and entrepreneurs with funding to advance radical ideas in hopes of creating breakthrough aerospace concepts. While they are still hypothetical, and years away from reality, the findings from these projects could reshape our cosmological model of the universe.
鈥淲ith 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,鈥� said Jack Burns, a cosmologist at the 澳门开奖结果2023开奖记录 and the co-investigator and science lead for both FarSide and FarView. 鈥淲e care about those first stars because we care about our own origins鈥擨 mean, where did we come from? Where did the Sun come from? Where did the Earth come from? The Milky Way?鈥�
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