Previously, I wrote about a new solar gravitational lens (SGL) telescope that is in Phase III of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. This is a visionary aerospace program designed to nurture the creative ideas and possible breakthroughs of innovators, scientists, and entrepreneurs.
The NIAC program has now announced plans for an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope that would be stationed on the dark side of the moon.
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) would sit down inside a crater, which would help protect it from the elements. Having a radio telescope stationed on the moon offers “tremendous advantages” over Earth-based or Earth-orbiting telescopes.
Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, points out some of those advantages in the Phase I proposal:
Such a telescope can observe the universe at wavelengths greater than 10m (i.e., frequencies below 30MHz), which are reflected by the Earth’s ionosphere and are hitherto largely unexplored by humans. And, the Moon acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar-surface telescope from radio interferences/noises from Earth-based sources, ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and Sun’s radio-noise during the lunar night.
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System, having a diameter of one 1km!
Bandyopadhyay explains how they would set the telescope into place:
We propose to deploy a 1km-diameter wire-mesh using wall climbing DuAxel robots in a 3-5km-diameter lunar crater on the far-side, with suitable depth-to-diameter ratio, to form a spherical cap reflector.
The proposal says with the LCRT telescope we could observe the early universe in the 10-50m wavelength band (i.e., 6–30MHz frequency band). This telescope could allow for amazing scientific discoveries that have gone unexplored by humans to this point.
Phase I of the NIAC program grants $125,000 to further explore the project and allows the team 9 months to provide further incentive to continue with the project.
