MIT designing telescope for the Moon
MIT researchers received NASA funding to develop a radio telescope array for the far side of the moon. Consisting of hundreds of telescope modules working in tandem, the Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) will be used to look back into the "cosmic Dark Ages" shortly after the Big Bang when stars and galaxies first formed. Construction on the $1 billion array won't begin until after 2025. Seen here is physicist Jacqueline Hewitt with a prototype radio telescope array. From MIT News:
LinkObservations of the cosmic Dark Ages are impossible to make from Earth, (lead researcher Jacqueline) Hewitt explains, because of two major sources of interference that obscure these faint low-frequency radio emissions. One is the Earth's ionosphere, a high-altitude layer of electrically charged gas. The other is all of Earth's radio and television transmissions, which produce background interference everywhere on the Earth's surface.
The only place that is totally shielded from both kinds of interference is the far side of the moon, which always faces away from the Earth and therefore is never exposed to terrestrial radio transmissions.
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I've seen a mock-up of the finished array, it seems that it will look something like this
...You know, as much as I'd love to see this sort of t-scope up and running last month, the design demonstrates once again that the Unmanned Probes Uber Alles types still miss a major point about science and funding: the taxpayers want pretty pictures to go with the charts and graphs and wavy lines. If it were up to me, every observatory instrument like this would be required to include an optical element to help provide those pretty pictures that keep Joe Punchclock and Ethyl Soapsjunkie entertained enough to ignore the fact that they're paying for wavy lines and squiggles and numbers that make no sense whatsoever to anyone but a scientist.
Of course, being someone who *does* understand how to read the squggles and lines and dots and dashes and numbers, I'm looking forward to hopefully living long enough to see the wonders that this array will reveal to us. If only the diabetes will cooperate and just be satisfied with taking 1/4 of one foot...
While researching this idea I discovered that it is true that Earth's EM transmissions do get blocked, but when the far side of the Moon faces the sun it gets bathed in radiation, including radio. Besides, we can't afford it.
Oh dear, every time I login to post a comment it's something negative. Bad me! :)
Anyway, in the article, for "will" read "might", as in "could conceivably happen", meaning "not actually physically impossible, but..." As Jeff (#3) says, the whole "back to the moon, on to Mars" is dead, it just doesn't know it yet. The Plantetary Society just won a long battle to get previous-planned space science funding that had been slashed in favour of the drive to develop a new manned launcher, a heavy lift booster and the CEV (all of which will be needed just to get back into LEO after the Shuttle's retired in the year after next.)
Who's job will it be to dust the thing? Moon dust is nasty stuff, I hear, and a lander lifting off from the surface essentially creates a powerful sandblaster that will strip any finish off metal, or severely pit any bare metal.
But who knows? Maybe some retarded taxpayer will figure it out, even if they must be constantly entertained while doing so. Imagine how far we could've gotten by now if Joe Punchclock wasn't so stupid, or if scientists didn't alienate Joe Punchclock with arrogant condescension.
Sounds like LOFAR. Just put a Blue Gene on the moon and you're done.
@SEIPMOOLP (#1), Exactly. :)
"Who's job will it be to dust the thing? Moon dust is nasty stuff, I hear, and a lander lifting off from the surface essentially creates a powerful sandblaster that will strip any finish off metal, or severely pit any bare metal."
...Good question, and one that can easily be solved by situating the landing site behind either a large ridge or sufficiently distant so as to minimize the amount of dust that lands on the array. Note that when Intrepid landed in the Ocean of Storms about 600 feet from where Surveyor III landed, when Conrad and Bean finally got to the probe, they noticed it appeared to have been baked. In fact, it had been discolored by dust that had coated the surface that had been kicked up by the LM's descent engine. During the post-flight analysis, NASA engineers determined that Intrepid would have had to have landed at least 3500 feet away to bring the dust contamination down to a bare minimum, and at least 6700 in order to eliminate 99% of it.
...Long term, however, the amount of dust accumulation is pretty much negligible, with "long term" being 10-20 years. Most, if not all of the Moon dust is really from micrometeoroid impacts. And while it is a continuous rain, it's not all that thick, and the accumulation can actually take centuries to really notice any difference - the Apollo Reflectors have been up there almost four decades, and astronomers running the lasers claim they can't detect any changes in reflectivity from the mirror arrays.
...The real threat is damage from the impacts from meteoroids that aren't all that micro. We're not talking the ones that make big craters, but the ones from meteoroids that average 1-3cm in size. These make impact craters anywhere from 3x to 15x their size, and that's enough to knock out one or two of those array elements, depending on how it hits the array.
...the Apollo Reflectors have been up there almost four decades, and astronomers running the lasers claim they can't detect any changes in reflectivity from the mirror arrays.
A-Ha! That's a tidbit of information I was not aware of, and makes this idea's prospects look much better (I'm referring only to the concept, not necessarily the other issues like cost and such). That was a helpful reply, thanks. The article on moon dust I read made it out to be potentially much worse than that, with the finer dust even being capable of circumnavigating the moon before settling.
Now I suppose the hope is that the radio telescope will also not be significantly affected by the ambient dust levels, and that repeated landings and takeoffs with presumably larger rockets will not change the equation too much. Time will tell, I suppose...
OM, are you out of the hospital yet? Good luck, man.
I remember hearing of a Batelle scheme to plant a farside forest of radio-telescope modules, using an automated rover. This was around 1988 at a conference on lunar bases. So the idea has been around for a while.
Batelle had its crawler spiraling out from a landing site in the big crater Tsiolkovsky, emplacing an array element every so often. If it finishes, you have a big radio telescope. If it fails, at least you have a small radio telescope.
The MIT press release does not appear to say whether their array will be emplaced by robots or by astronauts. Odd.
Another issue with plans like this is that, once you have enough space infrastructure to start building a farside scope, you will also have various spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and the radio sky will not be as clean as it is now. Gotta plan for that in designing everybody's lunar comsats, L2-point hardware, scientific orbiters, and so forth.
Re #6, sounds like LOFAR: this is rather inside baseball stuff, but what once used to be LOFAR split up into three telescopes when the partners went their own ways. The Dutch went ahead and built LOFAR, and there's a group building a long wavelength array at the VLA site in New Mexico. But Jackie is standing in front of the MWA prototype antennas. The MWA (Murchison Wide-field Array) is being built now in Western Australia - it's a collaboration between MIT, Harvard, India and Australia. It seems pretty clear that the dipoles in the MWA pics are the same ones that they're proposing to put "On The Moon! And Beyond!" - but they are first going to operate on the ground.
"A-Ha! That's a tidbit of information I was not aware of, and makes this idea's prospects look much better (I'm referring only to the concept, not necessarily the other issues like cost and such). That was a helpful reply, thanks. The article on moon dust I read made it out to be potentially much worse than that, with the finer dust even being capable of circumnavigating the moon before settling."
...I suspect we read the same article, or at least a similar one. The big worries about moon dust settle - no pun intended - on two concerns: the dust getting kicked up during landing(*), and the inhalation of said following an EVA. The latter is actually of more concern for moonbase habitation, for unlike Earth dust which is generally "smooth" due to erosion, Moon dust is seriously coarse due to even the dust being bombarded by micro-micrometeroiods. Think about those stickers you get walking through the tall grass, only on a micrometer scale. That's a layman's explanation for how this dust sticks to everything.
CIP: When Neil & Buzz made the first EVA on Apollo 11, they found that the lunar dust did stick to their suits a bit more permanent than they expected. After they returned to Earth, the initial belief was that it was some sort of static charge that caused the adhesion. It actually wasn't until Pete & Al got into all of their dust on their first EVA that it became apparent that the Moon dust stuck to everything because it was so damn coarse.
...Now, imagine that stuff getting into your lungs, and you can understand the concerns.
(*) Ascent concerns are slightly less than Descent if we're dealing with the same kind of configuration as with the LM, where you leave behind the descent stage. You still get some dust being kicked up, but the bigger concern is whatever gets blasted off the descent stage. You get really good views of this from the Lunar Rover camera footage taken of the last three LM ascents; a lot of kapton and other fragmentaries were blasted off by the ascent module's engine at liftoff, and although nothing was observed hitting the Rover, the concerns were still there.
"OM, are you out of the hospital yet? Good luck, man."
...Hey Bill! Yeah, I'm here with the earliest possible release being Saturday. There's still some issues with an exposed bone in the wound that they're debating on what to do with, and if they decide to chop it down I'll be here at least another week after Saturday. But I can't complaint - the nurses here have been 150% fantastic, and the care here is so good that I honestly want to stay sick :-)
FYI, Pat Flannery's keeping in touch, and keeping the groups up to date on my status. I didn't load Agent on the notebook, and I refuse to use GoogleGroups like the trolls who infest the group do. But much to the chagrin of those same trolls, I ain't dead yet!
There is no dark side of the moon. In fact it's all dark.
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