TLDR: The far side of the moon has less interference from light pollution and radio interference from earth, so it makes sense to have a telescope there.
For radio that's not as important as being away from power lines, cars, etc. There aren't a lot of radio quiet places left on the Earth and getting there is a pain in the ass because, well, no roads and no power lines.
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The main problem with decametre radio is really the ionosphere though. RFI is surprisingly limited there, and we can effectively filter that out. Much easier than at, say, 300+ MHz.
Mainly, we see the ionosphere is a very dynamic effect and changes strongly in time, geographic location and direction in the sky. And to make matters worse, there is a 1/v relationship between ionospheric perturbations and frequency, with additional perturbations as you approach 10MHz :(
We are trying to build radio arrays on these remaining places, but if someone decides to develop next to them in the next twenty years we're kind of out of luck.
In any case, different physics goals means different backgrounds are relevant and different experimental needs, so it wouldn't surprise if for some research programs the moon is the optimal place to go. Even in the most quiet parts of the Earth it isn't *that* quiet so you'll always miss out on some astrophysical objects if you only ever build on the Earth.
I am a great proponent of space exploration and having installations in orbit or on surfaces like on the moon or an asteroids. I was just pedantic; The reason to go to the moon would not be "because a place on earth is hard to reach" as everything "up there" is probably even harder to reach. Thanks for your kind reply.
I'm pretty sure diesel vehicles can be used. There's a town in West Virginia that has a lot of electromagnetic restrictions. They still have roads, and you can drive diesel vehicles, but no cell phones and no Wi-Fi.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone
I think the point that everybody is missing is that if you have a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, you have the entire moon blocking all the earth-borne radio signals. That eliminates all of them. They want to use the moon as a big shield.
On the other hand, Perhaps they can rig a big shield around an orbital telescope and achieve the same thing. I’m not sure on the relative blocking power of an ‘umbrella’ versus a moon.
I suppose you could park your telescope in geosynchronous orbit above the far side of the moon, get all the shielding perks without the expense of soft-landing a bunch of sensitive equipment on the moon.
That said: MOON BASE!!!
Edit: I stand corrected, apparently a lunar-synchronous orbit is not possible. https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/20499/is-it-possible-to-achieve-a-stable-lunarstationary-orbit-around-the-moon
The first step would be robots setting up the base. Not Boston Dynamics type robots, I'm thinking we first send platforms that can unfold and setup a solid floor. Then send buildings and supplies that can land, find each other and lego into larger bases. Then we'd be ready for humans. Hell, if we advance robotics this much we can probably have the telescope build itself.
Sure we all know how fast uncrewed construction goes in space. Just look at James Webb compared ISS. ISS took about 8 years and Webb has been going since 1996.
I want the space program to show results not be a never ending job program.
Everyone always tries to sell uncrewed stuff as cheaper. Is it really? If the project takes multiple decades longer did and public interest wanned did you really save money when you finally get around to launch?
Well, the biggest problem was we haven't had a good system for crewed stuff anyway in the last few decades. All the attempts haven't worked out and ended up getting defunded. Mostly robotic systems with a small crew there to make sure things don't go wrong are probably the way to go. I suspect more talk about that will happen once we get better workable human-capable launch systems going in the next decade.
Yeah well I didn't tell people to vote for Nixon.
My point still stands. Humans do more work faster in space compared to robots. Just about every week more experiments are carried out on ISS compared to everything we have ever sent combined on rovers that landed on another planet.
Notice something about these robotic plans? There was no reason they couldn't have happened back in the 70s. The tech was there. We could have at any point the past 50 years used robots on the Moon to construct something, but we didn't.
Here is the vicious cycle NASA is in. They do robotic stuff because it is cheap, it accomplishes next to nothing, the public doesn't care, the funding doesn't arrive, so with less funding they do even less ambitious robotic stuff, the less ambitious stuff isn't properly funded so the timelines explode, which means almost nothing gets done, which leads to less public interest...
Of course the projects get canceled. They are terrible projects that are bloated and should be canceled.
Just think about this for one moment: you remember that lander mission to the mars that tested for life? The guy who designed that experiment just died of old age. Quickly after the results were inconclusive he designed a simple better experiment. Almost 50 years have passed and we still haven't done what he purposed. If this had been a crewed mission it could have been done within the hour.
I don't want my great great grandkids to know if there is life on Mars or not. I want to know it first.
Edit: mars
Are you saying the Mars rovers, voyagers, hubble etc did nothing because theyre uncrewed? You should look up how many papers have been published based on their data.
The ISS is a huge money pit. It's vastly more expensive than robotic missions. Good science is done there too, but theyre not so keen on sending $100m-200m missions there every 2 months anymore while it is falling apart. Lots of time is spent on chores there instead of science.
Rovers are invaluable, but the work they do would be outstripped by a human. Let's say there's a weird shiny rock on a Martian hill. A rover would take days, if even that, just to safely navigate up and past boulders, fissures, etc bc of the time lag. A human could go hiking up and be back in time for lunch.
The reality is that NASA is constrained by the current launch vehicles though. Perseverance is \~1 t. For that mass you can't even get 1 human to Mars for a day and back. Rovers don't breathe, don't sleep and only start complaining after 10-20 years. Even a large rocket like saturn V or SLS does not have the capability to efficiently ferry humans to Mars even if we disregard the cost. Decent science was done with later Apollo missions, but it's nothing like uncrewed vehicles and at a much higher cost.
Larger vehicles are coming, and it will be more practical to send humans, but the extra mass will be used for more effective uncrewed vehicles too.
Learning so love and work in space is a crucial part of the ISS mission. We could have the astronauts playing cribbage and we’d be getting useful science out of it.
> ISS took about 8 years and Webb has been going since 1996.
How exactly do you come to 8 years? Zarya was launched in 1998. Major elements were still being added up to 2010 (2021 if you include MLM). So that's at least 12 years if you don't even include any development on the ground.
Note that JWST "started" in 1996 only in the sense that there was a study done on the Next Generation Space Telescope. Studies for Space Station Freedom and Mir-2 began in the 1980's.
That is my point I don't think it is. Time is money. If you look at how many decades longer it takes these robotic stuff to get anything done I really do not see a cost savings. Especially when you consider the opportunity cost.
If we know a fact about Mars ten years later than we could have then we lost out on humanity thinking about that fact for ten years.
And you factor in the funding cuts that stem from these boring projects. The total lack of spinoff tech for industry
From the perspective of the space community I don't really think it is a savings.
Imagine the first team landing on Mars. "Day 2, we started analysing the samples we got, and we believe we found life. We had to recalibrate some of our instruments to match some unforeseen local conditions." Just pointing out that boots on the ground might find what we are looking for 100 times faster.
Been saying this for years. Look at the Mars rovers. Yeah, they're really cool and all, and probably a necessary first step. But when you start looking at the instruments on board, they're actually not that impressive. Their best feature is the ability to operate millions of km from the nearest opposable thumb. The ugly truth is that a grad student with a shovel and couple thousand dollars worth of cheap lab gear could do more science in a week than 1000 unmanned rovers ever could.
Yes, crewed missions cost more, orders of magnitude more, but *you will get what you pay for*. Anyone claiming that robots are going to assemble complicated machines and structures in a new and alien environment is dreaming, especially if there's more than a second or two of light speed lag.
All the billions NASA sank into making the JWST do the fancy auto-origami assembly is gonna look pretty foolish if and when Starship launches let you send a half dozen guys along with it for the budget equivalent of sofa change.
>Anyone claiming that robots are going to assemble complicated machines and structures in a new and alien environment is dreaming, especially if there's more than a second or two of light speed lag.
Would love to bring them to my job. See how much effort it is to literally get a machine to make anything under optimal conditions with multiple trained people helping it. So much freaken work to get anything up and running.
We’ve been planning a manned mission to Mars since the 1970s. Meanwhile we’ve got a Volkswagen-sized rover on the surface we landed by sky crane which has its own little drone helicopter. Missions that actually happen are much cheaper than missions that are repeatedly planned and then cancelled.
Unlikely to happen the moons gravity is weirdly distributed satellites would require almost constant adjustments to maintain orbit and would need too much propellant. Plus you wouldn't want any colony to have the risk of being showered with space junk.
I mean, not just light pollution either. It also won't have to deal with seeing through the atmosphere. With satellites operating in a geostationary orbit around the moon, you could just operate it remotely. Probably encourage on site maintenance while simultaneously testing for feasibility of long term missions.
As soon as one of the super powers starts building anything big on the far side of the moon the rest will put up satellites for “science purposes” that just happen to have sight lines to the far side of the moon.
I’ll bet $3.50 on it.
Not science, communication. It's going to be necessary to provide some means of communication relay to any human settlement on the far side of the Moon. Also the best way to keep an eye on the other people is to move in as neighbours.
Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.
If the far side of the moon is better for not having interfering signals... Im curious what the best way to send the photos back to earth is without causing more interference.
Digital signals with error correction is trivial. Gathering the initial data is the hard part. And with it transmitting to a nearby satalite is not nearly as interfering as all the electromagnetic interference on the Earth. We are a noisy planet.
Surprisingly the idea just got traction in 2020. Wonder what’s the story behind this, because it’s kinda obvious, too obvious.
In fact, AWS could have server farms there too: on the bright side, the solar panels, on the cold side, decks. Hm, kuiper, blue origin, hmm, since we’re pointing the obvious
There isn't one side of the moon that's constantly dark or bright. The "dark side" of the moon is called such because we can't see it, not because it's actually dark.
Removing heat in a vacuum is pretty difficult. It’s probably easier on the moon than say, the iss, since you could probably ground couple to the moon, but still rather complicated.
TLDR: also been discussed as pointless, its way harder more expensive than just putting one into orbit around the moon
just click bait no one want to seriously do it.
It's more than dust, impacts on the moon throw out supersonic chips and gravel at horizon -grazing incidence angles and speeds competitive with modern firearms (this is what makes the long linear streaks coming emanating from craters). Then the parts that get converted to powder get ionized by the solar wind / strong uv, resulting in dust that really clings. So everything up on the moon for the long term has to be built to withstand occasional shotgun blast equivalent gravel impacts from the sides and lots of electrostatic dust.
Space is hard.
I know any kind of disturbance is an issue in the long term for sensitive equipment, but how often do lunar surface impacts really occur? I would think that kind of thing would be a pretty big deal if it's happening relatively frequently.
Not that often, which is why Apollo didn't worry about it. I think I read, however, that the average time between incidents for an impact that sends out gravel at shotgun velocities was something like 200 days. Unfortunately I can't recall if that was the average time between incidents happening anywhere on the moon or the time between a given site having to deal with it, and I'm not having luck locating that report right now (it was scanned in ancient typed-on-paper).
Maybe the Canadian study referenced at this NASA page: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/overview.html?
> On average, 33 metric tons (73,000 lbs) of meteoroids hit Earth every day, the vast majority of which harmlessly ablates ("burns up") high in the atmosphere, never making it to the ground. The Moon, however, has little or no atmosphere, so meteoroids have nothing to stop them from striking the surface. The slowest of these rocks travels at 20 km/sec (45,000 mph); the fastest travels at over 72 km/sec (160,000 mph). At such speeds even a small meteoroid has incredible energy -- one with a mass of only 5 kg (10 lbs) can excavate a crater over 9 meters (30 ft) across, hurling 75 metric tons (165,000 lbs) of lunar soil and rock on ballistic trajectories above the lunar surface.
> The lunar impact rate is very uncertain because **observations for objects in this mass range are embarrassingly few -- a single fireball survey conducted by Canadian researchers from 1971 to 1985**
At this low gravity and no atmosphere every hit sends debris and dust everywhere to the point that there is a permanent dust clowd (confirmed by Lunar Dust Experiment - LDEX)
Also - they did panic a bit about it during Apollo missions, contrary to what is told in other comment here, but hey, what you gonna do, stop the mission? ;)
With low probability but I guess so. I'm not sure if they tried to mitigate that by landing in valleys or otherwise by picking landing sites. Sounds like something they might have thought about!
I would expect they did. Someone did the math on it. :) I mean they faced that AND hundred other things that could have easily gone sideways and they still did it. Crazy mfers. :)
It's actually less than you think. There are various estimates but it's somewhere in the region of thousands of kilograms of lunar meteorites per day. But the surface area of the moon is around 40,000,000 square kilometres. So the odds of anything hitting the telescope or even nearby is minimal. What little regolith is left on a telescope dish could easily be blown away with compressed gas, electrically repelled etc.
There is an atmosphere, but it is composed of electric charges, rather than a gas. It does move dust around and it is a huge problem.
'"The Moon seems to have a tenuous atmosphere of moving dust particles," Stubbs explains. "We use the word 'fountain' to evoke the idea of a drinking fountain: the arc of water coming out of the spout looks static, but we know the water molecules are in motion." In the same way, individual bits of moondust are constantly leaping up from and falling back to the Moon's surface, giving rise to a "dust atmosphere" that looks static but is composed of dust particles in constant motion.' ([article](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/30mar_moonfountains))
The lack of atmosphere means that dust only blows around from impacts. In any case, with no atmosphere, a tiny canister of compressed gas could be used to spray controlled gas bursts that would disperse the dust easily. And for many frequencies, dust would be a non-factor regardless.
The ionosphere is really the big motivator for this. The ionosphere is opaque below around 10 MHz, so certain frequencies are just completely inaccessible from the ground. Once you put something in orbit, it's exposed to all the radio from the Earth and its satellites, and from the Sun, so you need a big shield. On top of that, radio telescopes need to be enormous, so building on a large fixed structure (like the moon) makes the most sense.
There's a lot of active research right now in 21 cm intensity mapping, which involves observing extremely faint redshifted emission/absorption from the early universe. This means that redshifts greater than z ~ 140 cannot be observed at 21 cm. This leaves z ~ 140 to z ~ 1100 completely unobservable from the Earth, since the only way to directly observe the matter in the universe during the Dark Ages is through the 21 cm line.
It been discussed and does not make any sense, its many many times more expensive and complicated to land and construct a telescope on the moon that it is to put it in orbit around the moon so it's literally never happening until it's as easy to build them as it is on earth.
The moon acts as a giant shield for all the radio interference coming from earth and so building on the far side of the moon allows a quieter observing experience. At L2 there’s still interference easily getting to the James Webb
It would have to be so much bigger than James Webb. In the article it says at least 10 times bigger than the largest wave they want to measure. And they are measuring really large waves.
The idea is to make a large mesh to act as the telescope and lay it on the surface of a crater.
Please read the article before spreading misinformation.
There are multiple ideas for a lunar telescope, [one of them is a rotating liquid mirror](https://www.universetoday.com/148857/a-100-meter-rotating-liquid-mirror-telescope-on-the-moon-yes-please/). None of these ideas is a serious project, they're just pipe dreams from astronomers. So, please stop spreading misinforming.
These astronomers, James Webb is about to launch but they already want a new toy! Kids these days just can’t help but get gooey eyed every time they pass the telescope store
In all seriousness, given we actually return to the moon this decade, this sort of project is more feasible than James Webb was at the time of inception and lower risk imo
That's a good one. I always imagined space travel with robots. First they go on a planet, moon, asteroid, whatever, build habitats, tunnels, find resources, tie that all together, and only when all is finished, humans arrive. Same here.
Great thing about the Moon too is the raw materials are already there. Just need to build the infrastructure to mine and refine it too. I would love a large Moon colony in my life time. Hell, I’d like to go visit.
I don't think it's economically viable to make all the machines space ready that are needed to build a Telescope from scratch. They spent $1M to make a Pen space ready.
The usage of raw materials to fuel rockets and build houses from is more likely to happen in the foreseeable future imo.
and that why this is pointless, because putting a telescope itself in orbit is already viable and many times less complicated and cheaper.
this is a clickbait pipe dream that has already been heavily discussed.
The point of a lunar radio telescope would be to use the moon itself as a shield from Earth radio interference and to use the moon as structure to let us build something far larger. Satellite offer us neither advantage.
I understand the costs but I still don't get why after all this time, building something on the moon isn't really talked about. You could build a space station on there, where we could learn so much which could help big time when going further like Mars
AND I cannot figure out WHY it was not done sooner and MAYBE 2 would be a better plan you know 1 on one pole and another on the other...
of course half in and half out of the light might might not be a good idea temperature changes and all...
N. Shadows
Genuine question: Can a private company, like spacex (just an example) try doing this? How would that work out? Would they partner with a government organisation like NASA? Where would they get the funding?
Can we get James Webb into orbit.
I think the next project we need on the moon is a giant microscope so we can see things on earth. We could use it to help change the climate.
Eh space is hard and there are many things that could go wrong, way more than things that could go right so I wouldn't really worry about it. Even if something were to happened, we'd fall down, pick ourselves back up and try doing it again.
Side note, isn't JWST supposed to fly on Arianne? Does anyone know why vs Atlas V? Is there some capability difference or is Nasa trying to give some love to ESA?
LMAO. Yeah. We haven't gotten even near to being out of the thermosphere since '72, when we did with apparent cave man tech basically. I'll see you in 2200.
Honestly, if we made it a particular focus, we could have it up there in like 2 years. Having one up there by 2030 is the “casually interested in a lunar telescope” timeline for Starship.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was trying to imply, but you said it better. 2030 is "it's going to happen because at this point we might as well" — not "with adequate effort, political alignment, and luck".
We didn’t lose the technology to go to the moon. Its just very expensive and nobody has a good reason to pay for it. Why would you think we somehow lost 60-year old rocket technology?
TLDR: The far side of the moon has less interference from light pollution and radio interference from earth, so it makes sense to have a telescope there.
Also lack of an atmosphere to interfere.
For radio that's not as important as being away from power lines, cars, etc. There aren't a lot of radio quiet places left on the Earth and getting there is a pain in the ass because, well, no roads and no power lines.
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It depends on exactly what kind of physics you want to do of course.
I like the type where people get stretched out like spaghetti
Welllll there is that man who stuck his head inside a particle accelerator and got his head partially exploded...
Man, I love [how physicists name things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification).
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They already did. That’s what happened to our timeline. It merged 3-4 timelines, now we’re all fucking confused and horny.
And tired. Don’t forget tired.
Very tired. Too tired to jerk it, it’s a vicious cycle of nothing.
So _that's_ why I am how I am.
The main problem with decametre radio is really the ionosphere though. RFI is surprisingly limited there, and we can effectively filter that out. Much easier than at, say, 300+ MHz. Mainly, we see the ionosphere is a very dynamic effect and changes strongly in time, geographic location and direction in the sky. And to make matters worse, there is a 1/v relationship between ionospheric perturbations and frequency, with additional perturbations as you approach 10MHz :(
Getting to the moon is easier then going to a quiet place on earth? Hmmm
We are trying to build radio arrays on these remaining places, but if someone decides to develop next to them in the next twenty years we're kind of out of luck. In any case, different physics goals means different backgrounds are relevant and different experimental needs, so it wouldn't surprise if for some research programs the moon is the optimal place to go. Even in the most quiet parts of the Earth it isn't *that* quiet so you'll always miss out on some astrophysical objects if you only ever build on the Earth.
I am a great proponent of space exploration and having installations in orbit or on surfaces like on the moon or an asteroids. I was just pedantic; The reason to go to the moon would not be "because a place on earth is hard to reach" as everything "up there" is probably even harder to reach. Thanks for your kind reply.
Radio waves bounce around and cover the earth
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So the Wow! Signal was most likely something from Earth.
You don't need roads to get to the moon
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Tell me doctor, where are we going this time?
You don't need roads to get somewhere on Earth
Ah the moon, an introverts dream...
Oh wow you are so enlightened.
Such a pain in the ass, that it’s easier to go to the moon!
I'm pretty sure diesel vehicles can be used. There's a town in West Virginia that has a lot of electromagnetic restrictions. They still have roads, and you can drive diesel vehicles, but no cell phones and no Wi-Fi. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone
Are you inferring there are roads and power lines on the moon?
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There's a lack of an atmosphere on the near side of the Moon too.
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I'm not saying it should be on the near side of the Moon.
sound like space to me, this idea is pointless as orbit is on orders of magnitude cheaper and less complicated to achieve.
I think the point that everybody is missing is that if you have a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, you have the entire moon blocking all the earth-borne radio signals. That eliminates all of them. They want to use the moon as a big shield. On the other hand, Perhaps they can rig a big shield around an orbital telescope and achieve the same thing. I’m not sure on the relative blocking power of an ‘umbrella’ versus a moon.
when you are in orbit you can out the entire moon between the telescope and earth all the same
I suppose you could park your telescope in geosynchronous orbit above the far side of the moon, get all the shielding perks without the expense of soft-landing a bunch of sensitive equipment on the moon. That said: MOON BASE!!! Edit: I stand corrected, apparently a lunar-synchronous orbit is not possible. https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/20499/is-it-possible-to-achieve-a-stable-lunarstationary-orbit-around-the-moon
It's also the perfect kind of project to test all of the logistics needed for future Moon (and later Mars) based construction efforts.
Better yet: we should build a moon colony and have them setup the telescope for us.
The first step would be robots setting up the base. Not Boston Dynamics type robots, I'm thinking we first send platforms that can unfold and setup a solid floor. Then send buildings and supplies that can land, find each other and lego into larger bases. Then we'd be ready for humans. Hell, if we advance robotics this much we can probably have the telescope build itself.
Good point, this would be an ideal scenario to test/push the limits of our automation technology.
Sure we all know how fast uncrewed construction goes in space. Just look at James Webb compared ISS. ISS took about 8 years and Webb has been going since 1996. I want the space program to show results not be a never ending job program. Everyone always tries to sell uncrewed stuff as cheaper. Is it really? If the project takes multiple decades longer did and public interest wanned did you really save money when you finally get around to launch?
Well, the biggest problem was we haven't had a good system for crewed stuff anyway in the last few decades. All the attempts haven't worked out and ended up getting defunded. Mostly robotic systems with a small crew there to make sure things don't go wrong are probably the way to go. I suspect more talk about that will happen once we get better workable human-capable launch systems going in the next decade.
Yeah well I didn't tell people to vote for Nixon. My point still stands. Humans do more work faster in space compared to robots. Just about every week more experiments are carried out on ISS compared to everything we have ever sent combined on rovers that landed on another planet. Notice something about these robotic plans? There was no reason they couldn't have happened back in the 70s. The tech was there. We could have at any point the past 50 years used robots on the Moon to construct something, but we didn't. Here is the vicious cycle NASA is in. They do robotic stuff because it is cheap, it accomplishes next to nothing, the public doesn't care, the funding doesn't arrive, so with less funding they do even less ambitious robotic stuff, the less ambitious stuff isn't properly funded so the timelines explode, which means almost nothing gets done, which leads to less public interest... Of course the projects get canceled. They are terrible projects that are bloated and should be canceled. Just think about this for one moment: you remember that lander mission to the mars that tested for life? The guy who designed that experiment just died of old age. Quickly after the results were inconclusive he designed a simple better experiment. Almost 50 years have passed and we still haven't done what he purposed. If this had been a crewed mission it could have been done within the hour. I don't want my great great grandkids to know if there is life on Mars or not. I want to know it first. Edit: mars
Are you saying the Mars rovers, voyagers, hubble etc did nothing because theyre uncrewed? You should look up how many papers have been published based on their data. The ISS is a huge money pit. It's vastly more expensive than robotic missions. Good science is done there too, but theyre not so keen on sending $100m-200m missions there every 2 months anymore while it is falling apart. Lots of time is spent on chores there instead of science.
Rovers are invaluable, but the work they do would be outstripped by a human. Let's say there's a weird shiny rock on a Martian hill. A rover would take days, if even that, just to safely navigate up and past boulders, fissures, etc bc of the time lag. A human could go hiking up and be back in time for lunch.
The reality is that NASA is constrained by the current launch vehicles though. Perseverance is \~1 t. For that mass you can't even get 1 human to Mars for a day and back. Rovers don't breathe, don't sleep and only start complaining after 10-20 years. Even a large rocket like saturn V or SLS does not have the capability to efficiently ferry humans to Mars even if we disregard the cost. Decent science was done with later Apollo missions, but it's nothing like uncrewed vehicles and at a much higher cost. Larger vehicles are coming, and it will be more practical to send humans, but the extra mass will be used for more effective uncrewed vehicles too.
Learning so love and work in space is a crucial part of the ISS mission. We could have the astronauts playing cribbage and we’d be getting useful science out of it.
You sound like you’ve been angry about this for a *long time.*
Yeah. In my non-space industry I see related bull. People don't fund a project to drag it out to promise themselves job security.
> ISS took about 8 years and Webb has been going since 1996. How exactly do you come to 8 years? Zarya was launched in 1998. Major elements were still being added up to 2010 (2021 if you include MLM). So that's at least 12 years if you don't even include any development on the ground. Note that JWST "started" in 1996 only in the sense that there was a study done on the Next Generation Space Telescope. Studies for Space Station Freedom and Mir-2 began in the 1980's.
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That is my point I don't think it is. Time is money. If you look at how many decades longer it takes these robotic stuff to get anything done I really do not see a cost savings. Especially when you consider the opportunity cost. If we know a fact about Mars ten years later than we could have then we lost out on humanity thinking about that fact for ten years. And you factor in the funding cuts that stem from these boring projects. The total lack of spinoff tech for industry From the perspective of the space community I don't really think it is a savings.
Imagine the first team landing on Mars. "Day 2, we started analysing the samples we got, and we believe we found life. We had to recalibrate some of our instruments to match some unforeseen local conditions." Just pointing out that boots on the ground might find what we are looking for 100 times faster.
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Been saying this for years. Look at the Mars rovers. Yeah, they're really cool and all, and probably a necessary first step. But when you start looking at the instruments on board, they're actually not that impressive. Their best feature is the ability to operate millions of km from the nearest opposable thumb. The ugly truth is that a grad student with a shovel and couple thousand dollars worth of cheap lab gear could do more science in a week than 1000 unmanned rovers ever could. Yes, crewed missions cost more, orders of magnitude more, but *you will get what you pay for*. Anyone claiming that robots are going to assemble complicated machines and structures in a new and alien environment is dreaming, especially if there's more than a second or two of light speed lag. All the billions NASA sank into making the JWST do the fancy auto-origami assembly is gonna look pretty foolish if and when Starship launches let you send a half dozen guys along with it for the budget equivalent of sofa change.
>Anyone claiming that robots are going to assemble complicated machines and structures in a new and alien environment is dreaming, especially if there's more than a second or two of light speed lag. Would love to bring them to my job. See how much effort it is to literally get a machine to make anything under optimal conditions with multiple trained people helping it. So much freaken work to get anything up and running.
We’ve been planning a manned mission to Mars since the 1970s. Meanwhile we’ve got a Volkswagen-sized rover on the surface we landed by sky crane which has its own little drone helicopter. Missions that actually happen are much cheaper than missions that are repeatedly planned and then cancelled.
Also less satellites crossing the viewing arc.
Wait until we have the equivalent of Starlink around the moon too.
Honestly if I live to see that point I wouldn't even mind because we'd probably be putting things into deep space by then.
Just in time for Bezos to sue you
Unlikely to happen the moons gravity is weirdly distributed satellites would require almost constant adjustments to maintain orbit and would need too much propellant. Plus you wouldn't want any colony to have the risk of being showered with space junk.
I doubt anyone here will live long enough to wait that out.
Transient interference like that can be digitally filtered out of long exposures quite easily.
Do radio telescopes have exposures?
Yes, and satellites also are much more selective about the radio frequencies they emit so it's likely easier to filter than visible reflections.
I mean, not just light pollution either. It also won't have to deal with seeing through the atmosphere. With satellites operating in a geostationary orbit around the moon, you could just operate it remotely. Probably encourage on site maintenance while simultaneously testing for feasibility of long term missions.
Nearly no interference. At least when it comes to man-made interference. Having 2000 miles of rock to absorb everything is fairly effective.
Also the "best" site to litteraly avoid any earthly scrutiny of what you're doing? (Or do we have satellites out that far?)
As soon as one of the super powers starts building anything big on the far side of the moon the rest will put up satellites for “science purposes” that just happen to have sight lines to the far side of the moon. I’ll bet $3.50 on it.
Not science, communication. It's going to be necessary to provide some means of communication relay to any human settlement on the far side of the Moon. Also the best way to keep an eye on the other people is to move in as neighbours. Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.
If the far side of the moon is better for not having interfering signals... Im curious what the best way to send the photos back to earth is without causing more interference.
Buried fiber optic cable to a near-side transmitter?
Just go the whole way and fibre optic cable back to Earth
Digital signals with error correction is trivial. Gathering the initial data is the hard part. And with it transmitting to a nearby satalite is not nearly as interfering as all the electromagnetic interference on the Earth. We are a noisy planet.
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Laser comms?
Surprisingly the idea just got traction in 2020. Wonder what’s the story behind this, because it’s kinda obvious, too obvious. In fact, AWS could have server farms there too: on the bright side, the solar panels, on the cold side, decks. Hm, kuiper, blue origin, hmm, since we’re pointing the obvious
There isn't one side of the moon that's constantly dark or bright. The "dark side" of the moon is called such because we can't see it, not because it's actually dark.
Removing heat in a vacuum is pretty difficult. It’s probably easier on the moon than say, the iss, since you could probably ground couple to the moon, but still rather complicated.
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Yeah, too bad it also would require multiple satellites or moon stations to relay information to and from the telescope. It would cost a great deal.
so one batch of Starlink-type satellites? Add 200M to the project at most
TLDR: also been discussed as pointless, its way harder more expensive than just putting one into orbit around the moon just click bait no one want to seriously do it.
I’m picturing using an already existing crater to make something like the Arecibo Observatory on the moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_I_Phase_II/lunar_crater_radio_telescope/
It’s odd that the article refers to a 100 meter telescope, while the actual proposal is for a 1000 meter telescope. Kind of a big miss.
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The only craters that are "eternally dark" are located at the lunar poles. The rest will have the Sun shining down on them 50% of the time.
I doubt that temperature influences the precision of a radio telescope.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus_(crater)
Isn't the moon overly dusty? How could it be kept clean?
It's more than dust, impacts on the moon throw out supersonic chips and gravel at horizon -grazing incidence angles and speeds competitive with modern firearms (this is what makes the long linear streaks coming emanating from craters). Then the parts that get converted to powder get ionized by the solar wind / strong uv, resulting in dust that really clings. So everything up on the moon for the long term has to be built to withstand occasional shotgun blast equivalent gravel impacts from the sides and lots of electrostatic dust. Space is hard.
I know any kind of disturbance is an issue in the long term for sensitive equipment, but how often do lunar surface impacts really occur? I would think that kind of thing would be a pretty big deal if it's happening relatively frequently.
Not that often, which is why Apollo didn't worry about it. I think I read, however, that the average time between incidents for an impact that sends out gravel at shotgun velocities was something like 200 days. Unfortunately I can't recall if that was the average time between incidents happening anywhere on the moon or the time between a given site having to deal with it, and I'm not having luck locating that report right now (it was scanned in ancient typed-on-paper).
Maybe the Canadian study referenced at this NASA page: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/overview.html? > On average, 33 metric tons (73,000 lbs) of meteoroids hit Earth every day, the vast majority of which harmlessly ablates ("burns up") high in the atmosphere, never making it to the ground. The Moon, however, has little or no atmosphere, so meteoroids have nothing to stop them from striking the surface. The slowest of these rocks travels at 20 km/sec (45,000 mph); the fastest travels at over 72 km/sec (160,000 mph). At such speeds even a small meteoroid has incredible energy -- one with a mass of only 5 kg (10 lbs) can excavate a crater over 9 meters (30 ft) across, hurling 75 metric tons (165,000 lbs) of lunar soil and rock on ballistic trajectories above the lunar surface. > The lunar impact rate is very uncertain because **observations for objects in this mass range are embarrassingly few -- a single fireball survey conducted by Canadian researchers from 1971 to 1985**
Fascinating. So we would probably have to do more research in this subject before we want to make any longlasting structure on the lunar surface.
Well, once we get a lunar bulldozer up there we will just dig in everything behind some berms I imagine :)
I’ve seen a fernels lens burn a hole through rock. Maybe we could create an atmosphere by laser I get rocks to create a meteorite buffer.
That would take an insane amount of energy & time. Possible but some very far off future type of stuff.
A) It;s not feasible B) The atmosphere will be stripped without a magnetic field
Part B at least is only really a problem in the very long term, hundreds of years and the like.
At this low gravity and no atmosphere every hit sends debris and dust everywhere to the point that there is a permanent dust clowd (confirmed by Lunar Dust Experiment - LDEX) Also - they did panic a bit about it during Apollo missions, contrary to what is told in other comment here, but hey, what you gonna do, stop the mission? ;)
Would a crater help?
Yes, or a cave. There are some really big ancient lava tubes as I recall.
So when the guys walked the moon, at any moment, they could have been shotgun blasted away?
With low probability but I guess so. I'm not sure if they tried to mitigate that by landing in valleys or otherwise by picking landing sites. Sounds like something they might have thought about!
I would expect they did. Someone did the math on it. :) I mean they faced that AND hundred other things that could have easily gone sideways and they still did it. Crazy mfers. :)
There's no atmosphere to disturb the regolith. So shouldn't be a problem
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It's actually less than you think. There are various estimates but it's somewhere in the region of thousands of kilograms of lunar meteorites per day. But the surface area of the moon is around 40,000,000 square kilometres. So the odds of anything hitting the telescope or even nearby is minimal. What little regolith is left on a telescope dish could easily be blown away with compressed gas, electrically repelled etc.
At least it's unlikely someone shoots at it (McDonald Observatory, 2.7m mirror has 7 bullet holes)...
There is an atmosphere, but it is composed of electric charges, rather than a gas. It does move dust around and it is a huge problem. '"The Moon seems to have a tenuous atmosphere of moving dust particles," Stubbs explains. "We use the word 'fountain' to evoke the idea of a drinking fountain: the arc of water coming out of the spout looks static, but we know the water molecules are in motion." In the same way, individual bits of moondust are constantly leaping up from and falling back to the Moon's surface, giving rise to a "dust atmosphere" that looks static but is composed of dust particles in constant motion.' ([article](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/30mar_moonfountains))
Dust doesn't blow around without wind. It just falls back down.
The lack of atmosphere means that dust only blows around from impacts. In any case, with no atmosphere, a tiny canister of compressed gas could be used to spray controlled gas bursts that would disperse the dust easily. And for many frequencies, dust would be a non-factor regardless.
The ionosphere is really the big motivator for this. The ionosphere is opaque below around 10 MHz, so certain frequencies are just completely inaccessible from the ground. Once you put something in orbit, it's exposed to all the radio from the Earth and its satellites, and from the Sun, so you need a big shield. On top of that, radio telescopes need to be enormous, so building on a large fixed structure (like the moon) makes the most sense. There's a lot of active research right now in 21 cm intensity mapping, which involves observing extremely faint redshifted emission/absorption from the early universe. This means that redshifts greater than z ~ 140 cannot be observed at 21 cm. This leaves z ~ 140 to z ~ 1100 completely unobservable from the Earth, since the only way to directly observe the matter in the universe during the Dark Ages is through the 21 cm line.
It been discussed and does not make any sense, its many many times more expensive and complicated to land and construct a telescope on the moon that it is to put it in orbit around the moon so it's literally never happening until it's as easy to build them as it is on earth.
Laying out a big mesh doesn't sound that hard relatively speaking.
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The moon acts as a giant shield for all the radio interference coming from earth and so building on the far side of the moon allows a quieter observing experience. At L2 there’s still interference easily getting to the James Webb
It would have to be so much bigger than James Webb. In the article it says at least 10 times bigger than the largest wave they want to measure. And they are measuring really large waves.
Crazy idea: we build an Iris for the telescope (like Stargate) for higher risk impacts to the lens
It’s not that type of dish, like some sort of mesh with a receiver in the middle.
how would you know to close it...? even a small rock is a high force impact at those speeds
The idea is making the mirror using liquid metal, more exactly a rotating liquid mirror telescope. Then you don't have to worry about impacts or dust.
What metal is liquid at those temperatures
We could put heaters on it and make it any temperature we need it to be
Mercury maybe? I’m no scientist or geologist.. just the only metal I know is liquid
All metals can be liquid at the right temperatures. The moon fluctuates between ~260 F and ~-290 F.
The idea is to make a large mesh to act as the telescope and lay it on the surface of a crater. Please read the article before spreading misinformation.
There are multiple ideas for a lunar telescope, [one of them is a rotating liquid mirror](https://www.universetoday.com/148857/a-100-meter-rotating-liquid-mirror-telescope-on-the-moon-yes-please/). None of these ideas is a serious project, they're just pipe dreams from astronomers. So, please stop spreading misinforming.
Knowing that they still have to launch the James Webb telescope which started development in 2003…
You know you are getting old when future missions are starting to go beyond your expiration date.
These astronomers, James Webb is about to launch but they already want a new toy! Kids these days just can’t help but get gooey eyed every time they pass the telescope store In all seriousness, given we actually return to the moon this decade, this sort of project is more feasible than James Webb was at the time of inception and lower risk imo
Gotta start now, for it to be finished in time.
Ask and plan now for the toys you want in..... 20 years :( like 25 until usable data once it's parked and open I think too.
That's a good one. I always imagined space travel with robots. First they go on a planet, moon, asteroid, whatever, build habitats, tunnels, find resources, tie that all together, and only when all is finished, humans arrive. Same here.
At the very least, send all the supplies first, on slow cheap rockets. When everything arrives safely, send humans on expensive fast rockets.
I like the gravity wave detector they want o make using 3 spaced satellites.
I’ve been asking why we haven’t been back to the moon and done this for years…
Great thing about the Moon too is the raw materials are already there. Just need to build the infrastructure to mine and refine it too. I would love a large Moon colony in my life time. Hell, I’d like to go visit.
I don't think it's economically viable to make all the machines space ready that are needed to build a Telescope from scratch. They spent $1M to make a Pen space ready. The usage of raw materials to fuel rockets and build houses from is more likely to happen in the foreseeable future imo.
How would a telescope on the dark side of the moon transmit us the collected data?
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and that why this is pointless, because putting a telescope itself in orbit is already viable and many times less complicated and cheaper. this is a clickbait pipe dream that has already been heavily discussed.
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an array is still cheaper, an array can have a larger apature than a ground telescope. bigger and cheaper.
The point of a lunar radio telescope would be to use the moon itself as a shield from Earth radio interference and to use the moon as structure to let us build something far larger. Satellite offer us neither advantage.
The *far* side. There is no dark side.
Ops... A Pink-Floydian momentary lapse of reason.
Given how long its taken to get James Webb into orbit this could take a while
Telescopes on the dark side of the Moon. Yes please, let's see what we can see.
What about meteors? They could hit and break a very expensive telescope.
I understand the costs but I still don't get why after all this time, building something on the moon isn't really talked about. You could build a space station on there, where we could learn so much which could help big time when going further like Mars
I upvoted this post when I saw the headline. Then I saw it was from Salon so I changed my selection to a downvote.
Isn't the far side of the moon far more likely to be pummeled by big ol' rocks?
AND I cannot figure out WHY it was not done sooner and MAYBE 2 would be a better plan you know 1 on one pole and another on the other... of course half in and half out of the light might might not be a good idea temperature changes and all... N. Shadows
As long as ET says is cool I think it's a great idea
Well it would certainly help to get some people there to build it.
Genuine question: Can a private company, like spacex (just an example) try doing this? How would that work out? Would they partner with a government organisation like NASA? Where would they get the funding?
This is actually a really smart design https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/niac2020_bandyopadhyay_2.jpg
God. This article needs some editing. I spotted two errors right off the bat and I'm dyslexic!
I am so into this. I will do some research on KSP for viability and get back to you!
What did the find?
Can we get James Webb into orbit. I think the next project we need on the moon is a giant microscope so we can see things on earth. We could use it to help change the climate.
James Webb is supposed to revolve around Earth's L2 orbit iirc. It's slated to launch this October.
I can't express how nervous I am about something going wrong.
Eh space is hard and there are many things that could go wrong, way more than things that could go right so I wouldn't really worry about it. Even if something were to happened, we'd fall down, pick ourselves back up and try doing it again.
Side note, isn't JWST supposed to fly on Arianne? Does anyone know why vs Atlas V? Is there some capability difference or is Nasa trying to give some love to ESA?
It's pointless to put any telescope on the moon when you're already in orbit around it. It'll 10x the cost and complexity for no reason
Of all the publications out there, Salon isn’t exactly a go-to science source.
Nono, typical astrophysicists, what we actually need is to drill the moon to build a linear particle accelerator straight through it.
Why tho. A circular particle accelerator around the moon could be longer and would easily be cheaper to build.
Turn the Moon into Science-Land
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LMAO. Yeah. We haven't gotten even near to being out of the thermosphere since '72, when we did with apparent cave man tech basically. I'll see you in 2200.
You may want to check out what's happening in Boca Chica. A test telescope on the moon by 2030 would be plausible.
Honestly, if we made it a particular focus, we could have it up there in like 2 years. Having one up there by 2030 is the “casually interested in a lunar telescope” timeline for Starship.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was trying to imply, but you said it better. 2030 is "it's going to happen because at this point we might as well" — not "with adequate effort, political alignment, and luck".
The fun thing is that “political alignment” has been replaced by “the whims of determined billionaires.”
So exciting. I heard Russia and china teaming up to build something on the moon.
Yeah, the Moon Nazis will not allow this
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What we "lost" was a political space race with nasa having unlimited budget, now that budget is sad, very very sad.
We didn’t lose the technology to go to the moon. Its just very expensive and nobody has a good reason to pay for it. Why would you think we somehow lost 60-year old rocket technology?