What if we built a huge radio telescope on the far side of the moon?
The FARSIDE telescope
Burns and his colleagues recently completed a NASA-funded study for a rover-deployed radio telescope that would spread out 128 antennas in a flowerlike shape about 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide. They call their project the Farside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets. Or, more succinctly, FARSIDE.
FARSIDE would study the magnetic fields of planets around distant stars, helping astronomers better understand which exoplanets might be truly habitable. The telescope would also give astronomers their first real chance to study a pivotal period of early cosmological history called the “Dark Ages.” During this epoch, both stars and galaxies hadn’t yet formed, so researchers can't see any of the matter that existed at the time.
NASA also funded another study on a proposal aimed at building an Arecibo-style radio telescope inside of a lunar crater, a project led by Jet Propulsion Laboratory robotics technologist Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay. After spending three years going through various designs of the telescope, he recently received funding from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts to continue pursuing the project.
And while multiple lunar telescope proposals are now closer to reality than any others in recent decades, "We still have a long road ahead," Bandyopadhyay says.
But Burns is optimistic. He’s now working with Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, which has built a Moon lander capable of landing 5 tons’ worth of cargo on the lunar surface. That’s more than enough to carry FARSIDE. All they need now is the roughly $1 billion in funding to make it happen.
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/06/t...es-on-the-moon