From Forbes: In the foothills of Colorado鈥檚 Rocky Mountain front range 鈥�- an area well known for cutting-edge space technology 鈥�- Jack Burns, a longtime astrophysics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder 鈥�- may finally be seeing a decades-old vision of a low frequency lunar radio telescope coming to fruition.
Since the mid-1960s, Burns and colleagues have been saying that our Moon鈥檚 far side would make a perfect spot for low frequency radio astronomy.
鈥淚t鈥檚 the most radio quiet location in the inner solar system,鈥� Burns told me in his Boulder office. In order to get this quiet, you would have to go all the way out to the equivalent orbit of Jupiter in order to reduce the amount of radio noise coming from Earth down to the same level it is on the Moon鈥檚 far side, he says.
But unlike previous initiatives to make a lunar far side telescope array a reality, this time commercial space technology鈥檚 accessibility has created a paradigm shift so that new space players like Jeff Bezos鈥� Blue Origin have expressed a strong interest in ferrying this telescopic array to the Moon. Whether this ambitious billion-dollar far side array will ultimately be funded solely by NASA or via a public-private partnership has yet to be determined, however.
Blue Origin would like NASA to fund them to bring our telescope but to the Moon, says Burns. But Bezos himself is interested in the science, Burns notes. Although technology for the Farside Array for Radio Science Investigation of the Dark Ages and Exoplanets (FARSIDE) is already in place, the lunar lander itself still needs some finishing touches. Thus, FARSIDE isn鈥檛 expected to see first light on the lunar surface until 2030 at earliest.