Photo: Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay
Not long ago, America decided it wants to go back to the Moon and establish permanent bases around and on the surface of the Earth's satellite. In theory, the Moon would become the perfect outpost for space exploration, acting as home for some, launchpad for others, and a ginormous telescope for a few.
That’s right, a telescope. These tools humans use to spy on other worlds and the cosmos itself are generally very pretentious, and need the perfect conditions to work properly. And what can be better for the telescope that the deadly void of space one can find on the Moon?
Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, announced at the beginning of the month an idea for a project called Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT). That’s a huge telescope the likes of ones we have on Earth, only built into an existing crater on the far side of the Moon.
The idea is to harness the natural, cavernous shape of an impact crater and build a telescope in there, one that can shoot piercing looks into the depths of space like no other similar machine has been capable of doing before.
The technologist’s idea is to use robots to create a 1 km-diameter wire-mesh (0.6 miles) inside a 3 km (1.8 miles) crater. That should make it the “largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System” and will possibly lead to “tremendous scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology.”
The advantages of fitting a telescope on the far side of the Moon are according to Bandyopadhyay the ability to operate at wavelengths not explored by existing hardware until now, and the fact that the Moon would act as a shield protecting the telescope from interferences coming from Earth and elsewhere.
Seen in the gallery above as something that resembles Star Wars’ Death Star, the lunar telescope is just one of many ideas submitted as part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.
Others include a slingshot for rendezvous with interstellar objects, a navigation system for spacecraft, self assembling space systems, and more.
Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, announced at the beginning of the month an idea for a project called Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT). That’s a huge telescope the likes of ones we have on Earth, only built into an existing crater on the far side of the Moon.
The idea is to harness the natural, cavernous shape of an impact crater and build a telescope in there, one that can shoot piercing looks into the depths of space like no other similar machine has been capable of doing before.
The technologist’s idea is to use robots to create a 1 km-diameter wire-mesh (0.6 miles) inside a 3 km (1.8 miles) crater. That should make it the “largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System” and will possibly lead to “tremendous scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology.”
The advantages of fitting a telescope on the far side of the Moon are according to Bandyopadhyay the ability to operate at wavelengths not explored by existing hardware until now, and the fact that the Moon would act as a shield protecting the telescope from interferences coming from Earth and elsewhere.
Seen in the gallery above as something that resembles Star Wars’ Death Star, the lunar telescope is just one of many ideas submitted as part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.
Others include a slingshot for rendezvous with interstellar objects, a navigation system for spacecraft, self assembling space systems, and more.
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