The far side of the Moon is inhospitable, with enough radio silence to detect signals from the Dark Ages.
(NASA)
A team of scientists at the US Department of Energy (DOE) and NASA are developing a new radio telescope that will land on the far side of the moon and help explore the unexplored early era of the universe.
The Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment Telescope (LuSEE-Night) aims to help cosmologists uncover answers to some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, such as the nature of dark energy or the formation of the universe itself.
The far side of the Moon is inhospitable, with enough radio silence to detect signals from the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages is the earliest era in cosmic history, which began some 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and there were no stars or planets.
But the dangerous environment on the far side of the moon means that scientific equipment has little chance of surviving – let alone transmitting data back to Earth.
The far side of the Moon is in total darkness for 14 Earth days, followed by 14 days of scorching sunlight. This causes the temperature to fluctuate between 120°C and -173°C – and drastic changes can occur within hours.
“Getting to the moon is easier than going to Mars, but everything else is harder,” said Paul O’Connor, chief scientist at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and instrument scientist for the LuSEE-Night project.
“There is a reason only one robotic rover has landed on the Moon in the last 50 years, while six have gone to Mars, which is 100 times farther away. It is a vacuum environment, which makes heat dissipation difficult, and there is a lot of radiation. ,” he added.
LuSEE-Night must reject heat in a vacuum environment during the day and keep itself from freezing at night – all while turning itself on for 14 days in continuous darkness and carrying out the first science of its kind.
“Power has to come from batteries, which can only be efficient given their size,” says O’Connor.
Furthermore, Brookhaven physicist Anze Slosar stated that “the LuSEE-Night is not a standard radio telescope” but would be “more of a radio receiver”.
“It will work like an FM radio, picking up radio signals in the same frequency range. At its core is a spectrometer. Like a radio tuner, it can separate radio frequencies and convert signals into a spectrum.”
After landing on the far side of the Moon, the LuSEE-Night lander will be permanently shut down, causing no disturbance. The telescope will then deploy four three-meter antennas on a rotating dish to collect data. Then, LuSEE-Night must face its greatest challenge yet: surviving its first night on the far side of the Moon.
Back on Earth, scientists will wait patiently for 40 days for LuSEE-Night to collect its first data set and send it to a relay satellite that talks back to Earth. Until then, they wouldn’t know if LuSEE-Night had survived.
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The article above was originally published from Wired with minimal edits to the title and text.
