Telescopes mounted on the surface of the Earth, or those that orbit around our planet don’t represent anything new, but as always, NASA wants to defy all odds. Telescopes mounted on the Moon may have been something you see only in the sci-fi movies, but they will soon become a reality if everything goes according to the plan.
According to Wired.com, NASA is in the early stages of planning how could it build a telescope on the far side of the Moon. Therefore, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope might be mounted on our natural satellite, meaning the largest filled-aperture radio telescope dish. The idea also involves projects known as FarView and FarSide, which would connect a long array of antennas.
NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) deserves all the attention
The aforementioned projects are part of NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts program. The future telescope could answer a lot of crucial questions regarding the existence of our planet and even when it comes to human nature, as Jack Burns suggests for Wired, who is the co-investigator and leader of the FarView and FarSide projects:
With our telescopes on the Moon, we can reverse-engineer the radio spectra that we record, and infer for the first time the properties of the very first stars,
We care about those first stars because we care about our own origins–I mean, where did we come from? Where did the Sun come from? Where did the Earth come from? The Milky Way?
The first stars that illuminated the Cosmos began to form somewhere around 100 million years after the Big Bang, and although they may not be around today, it’s still entirely possible to see them with powerful telescopes. The farther away a telescope looks in space, the more it looks back in time.