A Roadmap for Science on the Moon

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 17:45:03 +0000

A Roadmap for Science on the Moon Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/30/2020 - 11:45

Daniel Strain

From �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Today: Scientists at CU Boulder have laid out a roadmap for a decade of scientific research at the moon.

Teams from the university will participate in four upcoming or proposed space missions that seek to use the moon as a unique laboratory for peering back to the dawn of the cosmos—collecting unprecedented data on an epoch in the life of the universe before the first stars formed.

The first of these efforts will deploy an instrument called Radiowave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES). It’s slated to land on the moon in just over a year. Another involves a proposed satellite known as the Dark Ages Polarimetry Pathfinder (DAPPER). It could be in orbit around the Moon by the decade’s midway mark.

“It’s a completely unexplored part of the early universe, which we call the Dark Ages,” said Jack Burns, a professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “We have no data from this period and no prospect of getting any data using traditional telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Burns described the four missions during a virtual talk this month at the annual meeting of Lunar Exploration Advisory Group (LEAG), a scientific advisory body for NASA.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who also attended the meeting, shared in the excitement. Read more…

Off

Traditional

White

Under a DAPPER Moon: NASA Eyes Wild Radio Science Projects on the Lunar Farside

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 20:15:03 +0000

Under a DAPPER Moon: NASA Eyes Wild Radio Science Projects on the Lunar Farside Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/23/2019 - 13:15

Meghan Bartels

From Space.com: NASA's quest to return humans to the moon could boost a field of research that might not seem particularly lunar in nature: cosmology.

But the far side of the moon could be a powerful place to answer some of the most compelling questions about the universe — and NASA's push to bring humans back to the moon could cut the prices enough to make this science a reality. Even a scientist leading the push for NASA to investigate these missions admits it wasn't the most intuitive idea when he first heard about it.
"We were [science fair] judges together and they were asking me what I thought about telescopes on the moon," Jack Burns, an astrophysicist at the �鶹��Ѱ��, told Space.com. "And I said, I didn't think much about it at all. It just didn't occur to me."

Since then, he and his colleagues have thought about it a lot. Their conclusion is that observatories on the far side of the moon offer a unique opportunity for modern astronomers. Burns has spent this year thinking through two specific mission concepts designed to take advantage, focusing particularly on the period before stars began to form, called the dark ages. Read more...

Off

Traditional

White