![]() Instead of using thousands of reflective panels to focus incoming radio waves, the LCRT would be made of thin wire mesh in the center of the crater. Their concept eliminates the need to transport prohibitively heavy material to the Moon and utilizes robots to automate the construction process. With his team of engineers, roboticists, and scientists at JPL, Bandyopadhyay condensed this class of radio telescope down to its most basic form. But despite its size and complexity, even FAST is not sensitive to radio wavelengths longer than about 14 feet (4.3 meters). The receiver then hangs via a system of cables at a focal point over the dish, anchored by towers at the dish’s perimeter, to measure the radio waves bouncing off the curved surface below. This class of radio telescope uses thousands of reflecting panels suspended inside the depression to make the entire dish’s surface reflective to radio waves. The biggest single-dish radio telescopes on Earth – like the 1,600-foot (500-meter) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China and the now-inoperative 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico – were built inside natural bowl-like depressions in the landscape to provide a support structure. The idea is to create an antenna over half-a-mile (1 kilometer) wide in a crater over 2 miles (3 kilometers) wide. To be sensitive to long radio wavelengths, the LCRT would need to be huge. ![]() “But previous ideas of building a radio antenna on the Moon have been very resource intensive and complicated, so we were compelled to come up with something different.” “Radio telescopes on Earth cannot see cosmic radio waves at about 33 feet or longer because of our ionosphere, so there’s a whole region of the universe that we simply cannot see,” said Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at JPL and the lead researcher on the LCRT project. ![]() The lunar far side could be prime real estate to carry out unprecedented studies of the early universe. Random radio emissions from our noisy civilization can interfere with radio astronomy as well, drowning out the faintest signals.īut on the Moon’s far side, there’s no atmosphere to reflect these signals, and the Moon itself would block Earth’s radio chatter. Radio telescopes on Earth can’t probe this mysterious period because the long-wavelength radio waves from that time are reflected by a layer of ions and electrons at the top of our atmosphere, a region called the ionosphere. “With a sufficiently large radio telescope off Earth, we could track the processes that would lead to the formation of the first stars, maybe even find clues to the nature of dark matter.” “While there were no stars, there was ample hydrogen during the universe’s Dark Ages – hydrogen that would eventually serve as the raw material for the first stars,” said Joseph Lazio, radio astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a member of the LCRT team.
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