“Sometime next year, NASA plans to place the first radio telescope on the far side of the Moon. Far away from Earth’s atmosphere and protected from human radio interference, the instrument will be able to measure faint, low-frequency radio signals that are inaccessible from Earth, potentially leading to new discoveries about a wide range of cosmic phenomena,” reports The Doomslayer.
IEEE Spectrum explains:
The instrument is called LuSEE-Night, short for Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment–Night. It will be launched from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket and carried to the moon’s far side atop a squat four-legged robotic spacecraft called Blue Ghost Mission 2, built and operated by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas…
A moon-based radio telescope could help unravel some of the greatest mysteries in space science. Dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, and gravitational waves could all come into better focus if observed from the moon. One of Burns’s collaborators on LuSEE-Night, astronomer Gregg Hallinan of Caltech, would like such a telescope to further his research on electromagnetic activity around exoplanets, a possible measure of whether these distant worlds are habitable. Burns himself is especially interested in the cosmic dark ages, an epoch that began more than 13 billion years ago, just 380,000 years after the big bang. The young universe had cooled enough for neutral hydrogen atoms to form, which trapped the light of stars and galaxies. The dark ages lasted between 200 million and 400 million years.
Last year, 128 new moons were found orbiting Saturn. And a British spacecraft recently captured up-close images of Mercury.
In 2024, an Indian mission to the sun gathered information about the sun’s outer layers, using an array of instruments to measure and collect images of those layers. And a Chinese space probe to the far side of the moon returned to Earth with rare moon rocks.
Last year, a NASA spacecraft made the closest-ever approach to the sun to gather images of the sun’s outer layers.
