NASA has chosen to fund a giant radio telescope project in a crater found on the far side of the Moon through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program.
The NIAC is the space agency's idea hub for futuristic concepts. It has awarded the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) idea a Phase 1 grant, which is considered a huge turning point in terms of searching for life outside our own planet. The Phase I award goes to projects in very early stages of development.
The idea of the LCRT is to capture the "tremendous advantages compared to Earth-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes" on the far side of the Moon, according to a description by Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, head researcher of the LCRT concept and robotics technologists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, USA.
The giant radio telescope should allow researchers to make observations in space in much better wavelengths than observing the universe using telescopes on Earth. These wavelengths are yet to be uncovered by researchers, but it has the potential to deliver great discoveries in the cosmos.
The Moon also "acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar-surface telescope from radio interference/noises from Earth-based sources... during the lunar night." And when the Earth stands between the Sun and Moon, the area facing the far side of the Moon acts as a kind of low noise radio emission shadow.
Using robots, the LCRT project would be made possible by deploying a kilometer-long wire mesh in a huge lunar crater. It's essentially robots weaving a gigantic web-like mesh in one of the craters on the far side of the moon in order to transform it into one, humongous radio telescope. If successfully deployed, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would become the biggest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System.
NASA notes that the LCRT and other projects carried out through the NIAC are not official NASA missions and that they will take a decade or more to complete. However, NASA believes that these innovative ideas are worth investigating and could one day become a reality. The lunar crater telescope project, for example, has been around for a couple of years, with researchers debating whether it is worth investing.
The LCRT project is one out of 23 concepts granted a part of a $7 million investment through the NIAC. The Phase I award consists of $125,000 to fund a nine-month study of the idea.
