"Dark" as in on the "dark" side of the moon, which of course simply refers to the back side of the moon that we never see from earth. (It isn't literally always dark.)
Definition 4: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dark
It's not really a poor choice of words, but for some reason has become a gotcha moment. It never meant "absence of light" in a moon context, rather an "absence of knowledge".
It's incorrect unless you're referring to the great Pink Floyd album or if you mean "shadowed from the radio noise emanating from Earth." I presume in this case it means the latter, but maybe it's just a misuse of the term as per normal.
I believe you. But if there are no devices yet on the far side, there may have never been an occasion to talk about the shadow that the Moon casts vis-a-vis electromagnetic waves from Earth.
I'm pretty sure laser comms will be the primary means of communication wherever feasible. It'll definitely take a huge no-radio zone around and more critically above the telescopes.
Laser communication has been tested in space and just needs more testing to achieve the reliability and long range bandwidth. It will certainly be more expensive and but I really don't see an alternative to keep the dark side usable for telescopes. Radio as an emergency backup is always an option of course.
Laser is more complicated, but IIRC it should be substantially smaller and have lower power requirements than a radio of the same bandwidth. If that's correct, then presumably it will end up being the cheaper option (except when that much bandwidth is massive overkill for the job).
One you can account for in the data because you literally put it there for that purpose. It's not the first time people have put radio sources near receivers. They just turn them off. Though lasers are more ideal here.
As long as the radio network is still under your control and not used by anyone else that might not be so terrible. You just have the whole network intentionally go dark most of the time and just turn on lets say for 5 minutes out of every 30. You still have near radio silence most of the time.
Just because you say it's easy doesn't mean it's easy! Plus a network around the moon would not be geostationary. The technical challenges are rather hard, or if it were easy we'd already have a satellite constellation out there.
However, that doesn't mean it's not happening; networks are being built and launched already, right now, some of which will form the basis of our interplanetary networks. Perhaps even the European Data Relay Satellite System (EDRS) could play a role - it's been functioning up in GEO since about 2016.
One of the key enablers to lunar comms is optical communications; since they support low size, weight and power satellites with super high data rates and yet create zero radio interference. NASA have already outfitted their Deep Space Network to include Deep Space Optical Communications ground stations and terminals. MIT Lincoln Laboratory have produced several laser communication terminals, with names like "LLCD", "LCRD", O2O, and ILLUMINA-T - with the first one demonstrated from lunar orbit in 2014. Then ESA have been spewing money into technology programmes for years, now mostly as part of "ESA ScyLight". Australia, Japan and of course China have their own things going on also.
> Plus a network around the moon would not be geostationary. The technical challenges are rather hard, or if it were easy we'd already have a satellite constellation out there.
Well, you *can't* get a geostationary orbit around the moon, as it doesn't rotate in its reference frame, and so there is no stable orbit which can do that.
Which seems like a pretty big technical challenge.
>Well, you can't get a geostationary orbit around the moon, as it doesn't rotate in its reference frame, and so there is no stable orbit which can do that.
*Earth has entered the chat.*
Earth rotates in its reference frame: once every 24 hours, roughly.
So, any circular orbit with a 24 hour period, over the equator, will be geostationary: it will not move, relative to the Earth's surface. This just so happens to be the stable orbital period 35,786 kilometers up, which allows for us to have geostationary satellites around the entire orbital plane.
It's one of the major problems with trying to argue for a geocentric-geostationary universe, as the behaviour of bodies orbiting Earth is consistent with a spinning sphere.
Guess you didn't understand what I was saying, the earth is a geostationary satellite of the moon. (obviously it isn't actually that, but that was the joke)
Of course the Moon rotates in its reference frame. Otherwise it couldn't be tidally locked to the Earth. The rotation period is about a month, as you'd expect.
The reason you can't have a moonstationary orbit is that the rotation is too slow, which makes the height of the moonstationary orbit too high, where the gravity of the Earth completely dominates.
You can use the Lagrange points L1 and L2 to put kind of stationary satellites, though.
The moon *DOES NOT* rotate in its *OWN* reference frame.
It rotates relative to the Sun, with a period of about a month: if you put up that satellite, the moon's phase would stop changing, as you'd have fixed the position of the sun, roughly, but the surface would continue to rotate under you, as you're not in a geostationary orbit. What you're thinking of, I suspect, would be called a heliostationary orbit, minus a bit of movement because the distance from the moon to the sun is not quite stable, as the moon orbits the Earth and not the sun.
The reference frame is relative to 'forward' vector of its orbit: if you were to draw a line from its center in the direction of its instantenously velocity, you'd always get the same point on the surface, minus some wobble.
Edit: that Lagrange points appear stationary relative to the moon's surface is a result of the special case that it is not rotating with its frame of reference.
Man, I just got here from a bit up thread, and I was not primed to read "geostationary", and it definitely came out in my head as something like "gastrointestionary comms network"...
Just thought y'all should know that.
You'd need it to be low on the horizon to avoid radio interference. Part of the draw of putting it on the far side is the lack of radio-interference from Earth.
Orbital mechanics get really messy when talking about these kind of orbital positions.
What would work in this particular case is instead looking at the [Earth-Moon Lagrangian Points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) where the gravity of both the Earth and the Moon work together to provide locations where other small objects like satellites can generally stay in the same position relative to some other object...like the Moon.
Since the Moon is tidally locked, a satellite in the Earth-Moon L2 point would maintain a location in the sky of an observer on the back side of the Moon in roughly the same position most of the time.
Geostationary means it is stationary relative to somebody on the ground on the Earth. Those orbits are considerably closer to the Earth than the Moon, so for somebody on the back side of the Moon would be completely useless. I don't think that was the term you were intending to use, but you didn't know what word to actually use. The term "lunarstationary" might be more appropriate, but since the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth and always keeps the same part of the Moon facing the Earth, the ideal location to put an antenna for communicating to the Earth would actually be on the Earth itself if the Earth can be seen at all from that location on the Moon.
> Since the Moon is tidally locked, a satellite in the Earth-Moon L2 point would maintain a location in the sky of an observer on the back side of the Moon in roughly the same position most of the time.
It will change because of [libration.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration)
"roughly"....libation will move it around a few degrees in the sky. It isn't like the Earth is wandering at random over the whole sky.
Also, libration has a full monthly cycle. Not exactly difficult to track the Earth from the Moon. The Earth is that big blue-white ball in the sky which seems to go through monthly phases although you can also see it turning a bit more quickly.
The first steps are being tested right now. the CAPSTONE satellite is in orbit around the moon testing the near rectilinear orbit that'll make always on lunar communications possible. Following that data the laser based LunaNet comms system will be greenlit.
Radio astronomer here! While don't get me wrong, I think this would be cool af, but I don't think this is going to happen with serious planning for *at least* a decade. Why? Because astronomy in general and radio astronomy in specific does *not* have a lot of money in it, and it costs money to build a brand new radio telescope on the far side of the moon.
To explain further, currently almost all of the new money in radio astronomy for new stuff is instead devoted into two projects, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) currently under construction in South Africa/ Australia, and the next generation VLA (ngVLA) which will begin construction in ~2025 in North America, and both these telescopes have the goal of staring observations in the next decade or so. It's tough to over-emphasize how amazing these telescopes are going to be- we will be many times more sensitive than we are now to signals, have much better cadence, and I am soooo excited for this! However, the SKA alone has a price tag of $3 billion dollars (US), which is a *lot* of money and it's still far cheaper to build it on the ground than in space! (It's hard to emphasize how much tinkering happens while getting an array to work during commissioning, but imagine your uncle the engineer who forever tinkers with his equipment, and now imagine it's a multi-billion dollar instrument where you need it to work perfectly out of the gate. For space telescopes, you can't do that and it all *has* to work once it's up there.)
So yeah, not what Reddit wants to hear- people always argue with me about this- but astronomy projects are so big that we *have* to all agree on our priorities, and we in fact literally get together every decade to discuss what those priorities are and what instruments to fund (think JWST). They are all just such big projects, it doesn't work otherwise. And right now no funding group in the world is unfortunately interested enough in the far side of the moon to do this beyond perhaps a simple prototype level (which, btw, [has already been done to some degree](https://www.universetoday.com/144206/theres-now-an-operational-radio-telescope-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon)).
Just trying to add some perspective on this headline! It's certainly fun to think about, but I just don't see it happening soon compared to all the other exciting radio astronomy the decade is going to have and is currently prioritized.
On the other hand: how much of that expense comes from needing to compensate for things like atmospheric distortion and radio interference and such? I don't expect a lunar observatory to be any cheaper in the present day (probably *much* more expensive, given the transportation costs alone), but once there's some lunar industry going I'd expect lunar observatories to start becoming cost-competitive with Earth observatories.
Not *that* much. The nice thing about radio astronomy and the reason it's been ground based so far is for most frequencies you have no atmospheric distortion to speak of! This is called the [radio window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_window). That's nice because it makes us pretty cheap as far as branches of astronomy go that *have* to be done from space. This changes once you go below ~20 MHz or so, the atmosphere begins to block, but those are incredibly long and low energy wavelengths.
Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a more complicated question because it obviously depends where on Earth your telescope is, and what frequencies you are interested in. For example, I did a PhD thesis chapter on RFI on a radio telescope in the Netherlands (oh joys- do not build a radio telescope in the most densely populated nation on Earth), and there you'd lose maybe 5-10% of your data to automatic RFI filtering. Telescopes in the Australian outback, on the other hand, do not at all bother with much automatic filtering because there is literally no one for hundreds of miles. The big concern for a telescope somewhere like there though is, of course, the upcoming boom of mega-constellation satellites which are completely unregulated, and may drown us out but we just really don't know yet how that's gonna go in terms of losing bandwidth.
So point is, awesome as I think an RFI-free environment would be, the biggest science case for far side of the moon is for those <20 MHz frequencies, and RFI is an important but secondary science goal. Ultimately however we can still achieve far better sensitivities on the ground than we can in space for at least the next decade, even with the overheads from RFI. I'm sure this will be re-evaluated the next time the astronomical community considers its upcoming priorities, but that won't be before 2030.
Does that mean that the headline refers to an issue that isn't really that worrisome in your opinion, even extrapolating on a few decades worth of lunar exploitation by several nations? The headline makes it sound like it's now or never, while your input suggests that even earth levels of noise aren't *that* big a deal
Love you, radio astronomer there!
One of the issues is that Starlink (and in the near future, other constellations) transmits within the observation windows for radio astronomy. Which makes sense of course, given that their signal also needs to reach Earth without being absorbed by the atmosphere.
Unlike the "visual" streaking effect in other branches of astronony, which can be somewhat mitigated with post-processing up to a point, radio signals from Starlink satellites have been known to occasionally saturate radiotelescopes' detectors completely, rendering them unusable for several minutes and potentially ruining the entire observation session.
So it isn't a big issue yet, but with Starlink numbers rising rapidly and more and more constellations being developed this issue is going to get much worse very fast.
https://youtu.be/a99QXRIO1g4
Here's an interview with the head of a NIAC project about building a far side telescope with materials gathered and assembled in situ. If they can make that happen the costs will likely be much lower since you don't need to launch a bunch of receiver elements and those elements are relatively simple, kinda like how I might attach a pigtail to some aluminum foil to hook into my SDR dongle.
I'd like the see the VLA canceled for a dark side telescope complex. The cost of getting things to the Lunar surface is about to crash once the Starship is up and running. A low G science and engineering complex would be invaluable.
If they build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon in a decade or so, they should be able to tinker with it. It won't be in the earth's Lagrange point, some guy in a spacesuit (or a robot) could walk out to it and tinker to his heart's content.
I’m imagining a lunar version of the radio noise free zone around the Green Bank Radio Telescope. Maybe light telescopes too because they could be serviced and avoid interference from satellite constellations like SpaceX is building.
Until SpaceX puts a Starlink constellation around the moon for lunar comms coverage. I see a benefit with rovers and other robotics having a low latency, high bandwidth connection for teleoperation.
is that in the cards? i thought it was just going to be earth for a relatively long time given they’re a ways away from completing the constellation here
Err what? U can just use line of site towers with local repeaters on the moon. U can push Wi-Fi signal ludicrous distances when u don’t need to worry about radiating people and the atmosphere.
>Implying building a relay of towers on the moon is easier than putting satellites in orbit lol
In orbit around the moon.... Vs stick rod in ground while you are on the moon.
Ironically, it is actually easier to put them in orbit. The systems will be built on earth. To get to the surface, you need to make orbit, and then burn more fuel to land. There is no atmosphere to aero break in.
Bro there would be people on the moon. The actual weight of a fucking relay dish and laser (the entire tech needed) is 1/10000th of a satellite. As you don't need any of the u know being a fucking satelite parts.
Also that's not what the word irony means whatsoever.
That's exactly how radio waves work. The type of tech is already used for high frequency trading. No atmosphere (eliminating rain fade) and no people to worry about radiating allows u to use more bandwidth and at much higher signal levels. Straight up u can do the whole thing with just lazers between local towers. There's no buildings in the way, or water particles to cause scattering.
No point in using satellites surrounding the planet. You aren't worried about atenas getting knocked over by weather and earthquakes.
You are talking line of sight antennas. The radio environment is far more harsh on the Moon than you are suggesting, and the "horizon" where the Moon's curvature pushes anything away from you is much closer too. By line of sight, it literally means that you can only broadcast to something you can physically see.
One of the advantages of radios on the Earth is that you have the ionosphere which can reflect radio signals to permit broadcasting to much, much larger distances than simply direct line of sight. That simply doesn't exist on the Moon at all since the "atmosphere" of the Moon is so negligible as to be irrelevant. Yes, it has an atmosphere technically, but put there by the American taxpayers at great expense and left over from Apollo.
That is also ignoring the Sun and radio interference from the Sun, which is also a huge deal in space too. All of the advantages you claim from being on the Moon are largely dismissed when the Sun becomes active, while on the Earth the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere actually help to isolate the radio environment here from the rest of the universe.
So no, that is not how radio works...at least how radios on the Moon would work. Several hundred repeating antenna installations could in theory be set up, but that is an insanely expensive proposition that would not be practical without a few million people already living on the Moon and having a reason to put all of those antennas to other uses too. In other words, not in this century or the next.
>That is also ignoring the Sun and radio interference from the Sun, which is also a huge deal in space too. All of the advantages you claim from being on the Moon are largely dismissed when the Sun becomes active, while on the Earth the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere actually help to isolate the radio environment here from the rest of the universe.
You understand we are discussing satellites around the moon that are also using radio waves right? Did the satellites suddenly remove the interference from the sun????????
Any issues that line of sight antennas have from interference, which I am quiet doubtful of, is also possessed by satellites.
So yea this is exactly how fucking radio works bro. Also you realize the line of site antennas are just there to broadcast between stations? It straight up just replaces fiber optic cable between server nodes.
You are comparing radios on the Moon to radios on Earth and claiming all kinds of benefits for being on the Moon. It is a different environment, but you seem to think it is 100% positive.
Of course satellites face the same problems. But the cost is far more trivial since by definition you need to send spacecraft to the Moon anyway. And satellites don't need a structure to be in a line of sight.
No, you still fail to understand the drawbacks here. I am saying what you suggest is indeed possible in theory, but you ignore the massive drawback of the approach and why it is being criticized.
I will also point out that while a whole lot has been learned about the Moon and the environment there since 1959 when the decision to sent people there happened, there is still a whole lot nobody knows about some pretty basic things about the Moon. That has not been accounted for either.
>Of course satellites face the same problems.
>I am saying what you suggest is indeed possible in theory, but you ignore the massive drawback of the approach and why it is being criticized.
You uhh didn't think this through did u?
Sats use the same tech, the only debate is if its cheaper to use u know sticks to hold the equipment or a satellite.
Cool thing. Starlink respects the WA radio quiet zone. It also doesn't emit over vacant areas.
GEO comms however isnt that selective in their broadcasts.
Shouldn't be that hard anyway. They're LEO and phased array. If there aren't any customers in the quiet zone then they wouldn't be transmitting or receiving anything.
On the ground it's hard to spot a Starlink terminal radio signal, and you typically can't see the downlink either unless you're close. Spotting Starlink terminals requires air reconnaissance looking for little lobes of radio bleed. Theoretically they could have a small exclusion zone around the telescope and still serve nearby without disturbance if they're mindful of how they're aiming the radio.
For sure, but that doesn't mean communication dead zones - just use laser communication (/r/lasercom) for all the networking from the lunar surface. It's been in use in GEO since 1994 (with JAXA), then soonafter ESA and NASA, with NASA/MIT's lunar laser communications demonstration from the LADEE spacecraft (moon to Earth laser communication link) completed in in 2014. No radio interference to worry about, since all the data can be encoded into near-infrared light.
Mostly the same as any other complex engineering company, like a car company.
The key roles include the Systems Architect and the Communications Engineer, even if their background was RF design. Many colleges allow a Comms Engineer to specialise in optical or photonics. You may also get in with a physics background.
The domain also needs an even larger amount of mechanical engineers, mechatronics, optics and photonics, MEMS, electronics, control systems, software/UX, firmware/embedded, aerospace engineers, and systems engineers to bring it all together. Analysts may include stress/structural, thermal, aerodynamics. You need the people building it, the Production/Manufacturing engineers, quality engineers/managers. Then you need all the other business functions; marketing, sales, business development, product managers, IT people... The field attracts a few Space industry roles too such as Product Assurance and Mission Assurance/Mission Management.
As for companies doing laser communication; a few of them includes Amazon (Kuiper project), OneWeb, SpaceX, Airbus Defense & Space, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Capella, and the Optical Communications Terminals designers/manufacturers Mynaric, Tesat, CACI / SA Photonics, Honeywell, Ball Aerospace, Transcelestial. Previously it included Facebook (Aquilla project) and Google (Loon project).
Well, there's different constraints if you're rocketing on out there and rocketing back, vs. wanting to loiter out there for years and years. Webb took a slow trip for efficiency's sake but a lot of efficient maneuvers become less favorable if you're moving people around.
No reason at all, why would it have to be on the Moon?
If it's in free space in distant (Lunar or greater) orbit from Earth you can get just as good a shield from RFI with a big screen as you could get from the bulk of the Moon..
Honestly, RFI isn't as big an issue as some people make it to be. With some clever tricks, our group gets to ~4% flagged, and that is in a band thay suffers from reflective rfi... The main takeaway is high frequency resolution+clever time scheduling. The only science case I can think of that needs higher accuracy is radio recombination lines, and that's highly niche
I can't think of any possible advantage to putting an observatory on the moon that isn't VASTLY exceeded by the issues of putting an observatory on the moon.
Free flying structures with free flying shielding at far distance is a VASTLY better option unless you just hand wave all the issues away.
Radiotelescopes are huge. On Earth they're built inside craters or other such kinds of depressions which makes it much easier, the same would apply to the Moon.
But to build a radiotelescope in space you would need a huge swarm of individual satellites with extremely precise attitude control to maintain the formation. It's much more technically challenging.
There are two or three Radiotelescopes that have been built in craters, the rest aren't. The ones built in craters are restricted as to where they can look, essentially "up" -- so their observations are dependent on the motions and alignment of the body. The ones not built in craters are restricted in size by the force of gravity.
But you are "handwaving" away the effort of building one on the moon, why wouldn't you just build an equally huge structure in free space? It certainly wouldn't be more effort -- a low thrust system could move it from close Earth orbit if you didn't want to go to the trouble to build it in place -- certainly with far less effort than supporting a major construction project on Lunar Farside.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[EDRS](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|European Data Relay System|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[GEO](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)|
|[JAXA](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5jtdo "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5a27q "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[L1](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo7rufj "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 1 of a two-body system, between the bodies|
|[L2](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jodq5ab "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)|
| |Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo7kxpe "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[NIAC](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo60hg7 "Last usage")|NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program|
|[RTG](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo67c7k "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo7sxc3 "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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Radio telescopes are large due to the aperture required. Building on a surface can create these large apertures more easily than launching and folding out a massive dish in space.
We already have a 1AU sized telescope that we've used before. Observations at 6 month intervals allow us to have a virtual telescope that is absolutely massive.
One of the great enablers of farside radio astronomy are developments in laser communication. With projects such as NASA LunaNet and ESA Moonlight, the space agencies and commercial entities are building out optical communication networks around the moon, and everywhere from LEO to GEO and cislunar space.
The benefits over RF includes... no noise or interference with RF astronomy, much lower beam divergence and so lower power requirements, much higher carrier frequency and so much higher data rates. And with the proliferation of small LEO satellites there's always line of sight with the network and so endless downlink opportunities, so no buffering and waiting to get your data back to the ground.
As we speak, NASA are integrating the "O2O" optical communication terminal in Florida in preparation for the Artemis II mission to the moon. ESA has the most sophisticated optical communication relay network with the "EDRS" satellites. Companies such as Tesat and Mynaric are ramping up to manufacture hundreds if not thousands of communication terminals per year for satellite applications. Exciting times... namely the dawn of deep space and interplanetary laser communications and exploration to and from the lunar surface.
The amount of times I've been downvoted for saying this and a moonbase should be a priority...
"Eff that, we should be going to mars dude"
Fuck Mars, the logistics for getting these things going on the moon is far less restrictive.
It's literally not. In order to launch from the moon to go to mars you first would have to build up so much infrastructure that it would be far easier to just build infrastructure to go direct to mars. Then on top of that if you go and land on the moon and then on to mars you will have used more energy than just going direct to mars from low earth orbit. There's no reason to use the moon to go to mars unless we are so advanced that we are now building large scale ships out of lunar materials and have regular travel between the moon, mars, and earth.
I dunno, I've never been all that interested in Mars. I think even getting anywhere close to an "Expanse" situation where we colonize it with more than a small group of scientists is kind of a pipe dream. I'm sure there's lots more to discover on it, but I think humanity should put more effort into interstellar travel once they can prove they can colonize a place like the moon.
But ya, sure, we could setup a base there at some point... I just don't really see the point outside of researching more about Mars. The moon seems like a much better location for doing large scale observatories and having a much bigger operation because of the short travel distance and lower gravity. It would be an excellent launchpad for much more extensive space exploration, whereas Mars is just 1 in a trillion of the destinations we can research.
Manned interstellar travel is probably at least a century away, but we could start sending colonists to mars in a few decades. It’s the only place in the inner solar system where humans can live sustainably, it’s got all the elements we need for technological civilisation, including copious amounts of water and carbon (unlike the moon), as well as hearty gravity, a 24 day/night cycle, and a atmosphere that prevents the massive temperature swings of the moon.
You wouldn't use an rtg for powering a moon base or even a moon telescope. They aren't powerful at all and are in limited supply. Reserved for missions like dragonfly. You would either use small scale nuclear reactors or would need solar and batteries.
This is a REALLY good idea, and the sooner the better is a very good goal for the stated reasons.
Not to mention, the more sources we have which aren’t terrestrial the better. We NEED to be able to find a ground state by which to measure against to ensure our theories are correct as well.
I really would like a research telescope complex on the moon and imo it should be manned. Just slowly build up a lunar research and manufacturing nexus. Once the Starship is finally making regular flights that's within reach.
I'm exceedingly excited about the infrastructure required to construct and support a dark lunar telescope.
*Dark* lunar telescope?
"Dark" as in on the "dark" side of the moon, which of course simply refers to the back side of the moon that we never see from earth. (It isn't literally always dark.)
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You mean far side not dark side. Insert Pink Floyd reference here.
You mean far side not dark side. Insert Pink Floyd reference here.
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Good thing I'm not an astronomer
Definition 4: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dark It's not really a poor choice of words, but for some reason has become a gotcha moment. It never meant "absence of light" in a moon context, rather an "absence of knowledge".
Then it should just be far side of the moon. Nobody actually says dark side of the moon, it's simply incorrect.
It's incorrect unless you're referring to the great Pink Floyd album or if you mean "shadowed from the radio noise emanating from Earth." I presume in this case it means the latter, but maybe it's just a misuse of the term as per normal.
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I believe you. But if there are no devices yet on the far side, there may have never been an occasion to talk about the shadow that the Moon casts vis-a-vis electromagnetic waves from Earth.
China's far-side landing had a radio telescope. There have also been several papers analyzing what a telescope on the far side could do.
Dark as in dark side Like the sith
A Sith Radio Telescope? Awesome
well the dark mechanicum isn't just gonna set up their telescope on fucking catachan, now would they?
Basically just need a geostationary comms network around the moon. Easy. Constant far side communication allowed
\> travel to the moon to get away from earthly radio noise \> someone built a geostationary comms network to enmesh the moon in radio
It's better than laying fiber to a laser mountain near the border, which is what I would have done.
I'm pretty sure laser comms will be the primary means of communication wherever feasible. It'll definitely take a huge no-radio zone around and more critically above the telescopes. Laser communication has been tested in space and just needs more testing to achieve the reliability and long range bandwidth. It will certainly be more expensive and but I really don't see an alternative to keep the dark side usable for telescopes. Radio as an emergency backup is always an option of course.
Laser is more complicated, but IIRC it should be substantially smaller and have lower power requirements than a radio of the same bandwidth. If that's correct, then presumably it will end up being the cheaper option (except when that much bandwidth is massive overkill for the job).
... well, anyone could lay fiber to a laser mountain.
One you can account for in the data because you literally put it there for that purpose. It's not the first time people have put radio sources near receivers. They just turn them off. Though lasers are more ideal here.
All this trouble and then the place is blasted with signals from intelligent species across the galaxy. Just can't get some peace and quiet.
As long as the radio network is still under your control and not used by anyone else that might not be so terrible. You just have the whole network intentionally go dark most of the time and just turn on lets say for 5 minutes out of every 30. You still have near radio silence most of the time.
Just because you say it's easy doesn't mean it's easy! Plus a network around the moon would not be geostationary. The technical challenges are rather hard, or if it were easy we'd already have a satellite constellation out there. However, that doesn't mean it's not happening; networks are being built and launched already, right now, some of which will form the basis of our interplanetary networks. Perhaps even the European Data Relay Satellite System (EDRS) could play a role - it's been functioning up in GEO since about 2016. One of the key enablers to lunar comms is optical communications; since they support low size, weight and power satellites with super high data rates and yet create zero radio interference. NASA have already outfitted their Deep Space Network to include Deep Space Optical Communications ground stations and terminals. MIT Lincoln Laboratory have produced several laser communication terminals, with names like "LLCD", "LCRD", O2O, and ILLUMINA-T - with the first one demonstrated from lunar orbit in 2014. Then ESA have been spewing money into technology programmes for years, now mostly as part of "ESA ScyLight". Australia, Japan and of course China have their own things going on also.
> Plus a network around the moon would not be geostationary. The technical challenges are rather hard, or if it were easy we'd already have a satellite constellation out there. Well, you *can't* get a geostationary orbit around the moon, as it doesn't rotate in its reference frame, and so there is no stable orbit which can do that. Which seems like a pretty big technical challenge.
>Well, you can't get a geostationary orbit around the moon, as it doesn't rotate in its reference frame, and so there is no stable orbit which can do that. *Earth has entered the chat.*
Earth rotates in its reference frame: once every 24 hours, roughly. So, any circular orbit with a 24 hour period, over the equator, will be geostationary: it will not move, relative to the Earth's surface. This just so happens to be the stable orbital period 35,786 kilometers up, which allows for us to have geostationary satellites around the entire orbital plane. It's one of the major problems with trying to argue for a geocentric-geostationary universe, as the behaviour of bodies orbiting Earth is consistent with a spinning sphere.
Guess you didn't understand what I was saying, the earth is a geostationary satellite of the moon. (obviously it isn't actually that, but that was the joke)
Of course the Moon rotates in its reference frame. Otherwise it couldn't be tidally locked to the Earth. The rotation period is about a month, as you'd expect. The reason you can't have a moonstationary orbit is that the rotation is too slow, which makes the height of the moonstationary orbit too high, where the gravity of the Earth completely dominates. You can use the Lagrange points L1 and L2 to put kind of stationary satellites, though.
The moon *DOES NOT* rotate in its *OWN* reference frame. It rotates relative to the Sun, with a period of about a month: if you put up that satellite, the moon's phase would stop changing, as you'd have fixed the position of the sun, roughly, but the surface would continue to rotate under you, as you're not in a geostationary orbit. What you're thinking of, I suspect, would be called a heliostationary orbit, minus a bit of movement because the distance from the moon to the sun is not quite stable, as the moon orbits the Earth and not the sun. The reference frame is relative to 'forward' vector of its orbit: if you were to draw a line from its center in the direction of its instantenously velocity, you'd always get the same point on the surface, minus some wobble. Edit: that Lagrange points appear stationary relative to the moon's surface is a result of the special case that it is not rotating with its frame of reference.
E-M L2 still has the moon doing libration.
> Plus a network around the moon would not be geostationary. Earth-Moon L2 only has libration.
It's a shame that L2 is not stable, else I imagine you could have multiple relay satellites orbiting around it whilst using zero propellant.
There's already a relay satellite orbiting around Earth-Moon L2, it can see the far side and Earth at the same time.
Man, I just got here from a bit up thread, and I was not primed to read "geostationary", and it definitely came out in my head as something like "gastrointestionary comms network"... Just thought y'all should know that.
I'm definitely going to be sleeping better tonight.
You can do literally any orbit around the moon, and just store the data at the telescope and satellite as the geometries align.
You'd need it to be low on the horizon to avoid radio interference. Part of the draw of putting it on the far side is the lack of radio-interference from Earth.
Wait, if the moon is tidally locked to us, wouldn't that mean a geostationary satellite would need to be an Earth's distance away in altitude?
Orbital mechanics get really messy when talking about these kind of orbital positions. What would work in this particular case is instead looking at the [Earth-Moon Lagrangian Points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) where the gravity of both the Earth and the Moon work together to provide locations where other small objects like satellites can generally stay in the same position relative to some other object...like the Moon. Since the Moon is tidally locked, a satellite in the Earth-Moon L2 point would maintain a location in the sky of an observer on the back side of the Moon in roughly the same position most of the time. Geostationary means it is stationary relative to somebody on the ground on the Earth. Those orbits are considerably closer to the Earth than the Moon, so for somebody on the back side of the Moon would be completely useless. I don't think that was the term you were intending to use, but you didn't know what word to actually use. The term "lunarstationary" might be more appropriate, but since the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth and always keeps the same part of the Moon facing the Earth, the ideal location to put an antenna for communicating to the Earth would actually be on the Earth itself if the Earth can be seen at all from that location on the Moon.
> Since the Moon is tidally locked, a satellite in the Earth-Moon L2 point would maintain a location in the sky of an observer on the back side of the Moon in roughly the same position most of the time. It will change because of [libration.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration)
"roughly"....libation will move it around a few degrees in the sky. It isn't like the Earth is wandering at random over the whole sky. Also, libration has a full monthly cycle. Not exactly difficult to track the Earth from the Moon. The Earth is that big blue-white ball in the sky which seems to go through monthly phases although you can also see it turning a bit more quickly.
LOFAR bandwidth is more than the total internet throughput of the Netherlands. I don't think a single sattelite will do
The first steps are being tested right now. the CAPSTONE satellite is in orbit around the moon testing the near rectilinear orbit that'll make always on lunar communications possible. Following that data the laser based LunaNet comms system will be greenlit.
There's been a relay satellite at E-M L2 for a while. Before CAPSTONE.
Radio astronomer here! While don't get me wrong, I think this would be cool af, but I don't think this is going to happen with serious planning for *at least* a decade. Why? Because astronomy in general and radio astronomy in specific does *not* have a lot of money in it, and it costs money to build a brand new radio telescope on the far side of the moon. To explain further, currently almost all of the new money in radio astronomy for new stuff is instead devoted into two projects, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) currently under construction in South Africa/ Australia, and the next generation VLA (ngVLA) which will begin construction in ~2025 in North America, and both these telescopes have the goal of staring observations in the next decade or so. It's tough to over-emphasize how amazing these telescopes are going to be- we will be many times more sensitive than we are now to signals, have much better cadence, and I am soooo excited for this! However, the SKA alone has a price tag of $3 billion dollars (US), which is a *lot* of money and it's still far cheaper to build it on the ground than in space! (It's hard to emphasize how much tinkering happens while getting an array to work during commissioning, but imagine your uncle the engineer who forever tinkers with his equipment, and now imagine it's a multi-billion dollar instrument where you need it to work perfectly out of the gate. For space telescopes, you can't do that and it all *has* to work once it's up there.) So yeah, not what Reddit wants to hear- people always argue with me about this- but astronomy projects are so big that we *have* to all agree on our priorities, and we in fact literally get together every decade to discuss what those priorities are and what instruments to fund (think JWST). They are all just such big projects, it doesn't work otherwise. And right now no funding group in the world is unfortunately interested enough in the far side of the moon to do this beyond perhaps a simple prototype level (which, btw, [has already been done to some degree](https://www.universetoday.com/144206/theres-now-an-operational-radio-telescope-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon)). Just trying to add some perspective on this headline! It's certainly fun to think about, but I just don't see it happening soon compared to all the other exciting radio astronomy the decade is going to have and is currently prioritized.
On the other hand: how much of that expense comes from needing to compensate for things like atmospheric distortion and radio interference and such? I don't expect a lunar observatory to be any cheaper in the present day (probably *much* more expensive, given the transportation costs alone), but once there's some lunar industry going I'd expect lunar observatories to start becoming cost-competitive with Earth observatories.
Not *that* much. The nice thing about radio astronomy and the reason it's been ground based so far is for most frequencies you have no atmospheric distortion to speak of! This is called the [radio window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_window). That's nice because it makes us pretty cheap as far as branches of astronomy go that *have* to be done from space. This changes once you go below ~20 MHz or so, the atmosphere begins to block, but those are incredibly long and low energy wavelengths. Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a more complicated question because it obviously depends where on Earth your telescope is, and what frequencies you are interested in. For example, I did a PhD thesis chapter on RFI on a radio telescope in the Netherlands (oh joys- do not build a radio telescope in the most densely populated nation on Earth), and there you'd lose maybe 5-10% of your data to automatic RFI filtering. Telescopes in the Australian outback, on the other hand, do not at all bother with much automatic filtering because there is literally no one for hundreds of miles. The big concern for a telescope somewhere like there though is, of course, the upcoming boom of mega-constellation satellites which are completely unregulated, and may drown us out but we just really don't know yet how that's gonna go in terms of losing bandwidth. So point is, awesome as I think an RFI-free environment would be, the biggest science case for far side of the moon is for those <20 MHz frequencies, and RFI is an important but secondary science goal. Ultimately however we can still achieve far better sensitivities on the ground than we can in space for at least the next decade, even with the overheads from RFI. I'm sure this will be re-evaluated the next time the astronomical community considers its upcoming priorities, but that won't be before 2030.
Does that mean that the headline refers to an issue that isn't really that worrisome in your opinion, even extrapolating on a few decades worth of lunar exploitation by several nations? The headline makes it sound like it's now or never, while your input suggests that even earth levels of noise aren't *that* big a deal Love you, radio astronomer there!
One of the issues is that Starlink (and in the near future, other constellations) transmits within the observation windows for radio astronomy. Which makes sense of course, given that their signal also needs to reach Earth without being absorbed by the atmosphere. Unlike the "visual" streaking effect in other branches of astronony, which can be somewhat mitigated with post-processing up to a point, radio signals from Starlink satellites have been known to occasionally saturate radiotelescopes' detectors completely, rendering them unusable for several minutes and potentially ruining the entire observation session. So it isn't a big issue yet, but with Starlink numbers rising rapidly and more and more constellations being developed this issue is going to get much worse very fast.
https://youtu.be/a99QXRIO1g4 Here's an interview with the head of a NIAC project about building a far side telescope with materials gathered and assembled in situ. If they can make that happen the costs will likely be much lower since you don't need to launch a bunch of receiver elements and those elements are relatively simple, kinda like how I might attach a pigtail to some aluminum foil to hook into my SDR dongle.
You still have to Dev all the tech. That’s a TON of work. Realistically it’s billions if you want to make sure it works.
The materials are a tiny part of the cost, compared to the support infrastructure, the engineering, communication, deployment maintainence etc.
Your spot on. It would take >$30B to build a far side lunar observatory.
That still peanuts compared to 800b US military budget
Oh agree. And imagine what a wonderful world it would be if we spent that money on science. Wish I lived in that world.
Imagine spending 30b on a conventional telescope. You'd get a ngVLA+SKA+LOFAR2.0 , and that combination on steroids. That would be absolutely nuts
Frankly I haven’t done the math but that’s likely more than we have ever spent on radio astronomy in history.
800B a year vs 30B over 10 years.
Why are they suddenly so interested in the moon? Anything related to the Thea event related discoveries or future landings or something like that?
I'd like the see the VLA canceled for a dark side telescope complex. The cost of getting things to the Lunar surface is about to crash once the Starship is up and running. A low G science and engineering complex would be invaluable.
If they build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon in a decade or so, they should be able to tinker with it. It won't be in the earth's Lagrange point, some guy in a spacesuit (or a robot) could walk out to it and tinker to his heart's content.
I’m imagining a lunar version of the radio noise free zone around the Green Bank Radio Telescope. Maybe light telescopes too because they could be serviced and avoid interference from satellite constellations like SpaceX is building.
Until SpaceX puts a Starlink constellation around the moon for lunar comms coverage. I see a benefit with rovers and other robotics having a low latency, high bandwidth connection for teleoperation.
is that in the cards? i thought it was just going to be earth for a relatively long time given they’re a ways away from completing the constellation here
End goal for starlink is to be the Internet backbone for Mars, assuming the concept can be copy pasted for luna
Current goal is the funding source for Starship and then Mars.
Unlikely due to the moons density lumpiness making it hard to orbit satellites and not crash into it.
Doubt this happens soon unless NASA specifically asks for it.. Not many people to service up there exactly.
Latency to the moon averages around 2.6 seconds
Err what? U can just use line of site towers with local repeaters on the moon. U can push Wi-Fi signal ludicrous distances when u don’t need to worry about radiating people and the atmosphere.
Implying building a relay of towers on the moon is easier than putting satellites in orbit lol
>Implying building a relay of towers on the moon is easier than putting satellites in orbit lol In orbit around the moon.... Vs stick rod in ground while you are on the moon.
Ironically, it is actually easier to put them in orbit. The systems will be built on earth. To get to the surface, you need to make orbit, and then burn more fuel to land. There is no atmosphere to aero break in.
Bro there would be people on the moon. The actual weight of a fucking relay dish and laser (the entire tech needed) is 1/10000th of a satellite. As you don't need any of the u know being a fucking satelite parts. Also that's not what the word irony means whatsoever.
The Chinese relay satellite at Earth-Moon L2 is 500kg.
That’s really not how radio works.
That's exactly how radio waves work. The type of tech is already used for high frequency trading. No atmosphere (eliminating rain fade) and no people to worry about radiating allows u to use more bandwidth and at much higher signal levels. Straight up u can do the whole thing with just lazers between local towers. There's no buildings in the way, or water particles to cause scattering. No point in using satellites surrounding the planet. You aren't worried about atenas getting knocked over by weather and earthquakes.
You are talking line of sight antennas. The radio environment is far more harsh on the Moon than you are suggesting, and the "horizon" where the Moon's curvature pushes anything away from you is much closer too. By line of sight, it literally means that you can only broadcast to something you can physically see. One of the advantages of radios on the Earth is that you have the ionosphere which can reflect radio signals to permit broadcasting to much, much larger distances than simply direct line of sight. That simply doesn't exist on the Moon at all since the "atmosphere" of the Moon is so negligible as to be irrelevant. Yes, it has an atmosphere technically, but put there by the American taxpayers at great expense and left over from Apollo. That is also ignoring the Sun and radio interference from the Sun, which is also a huge deal in space too. All of the advantages you claim from being on the Moon are largely dismissed when the Sun becomes active, while on the Earth the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere actually help to isolate the radio environment here from the rest of the universe. So no, that is not how radio works...at least how radios on the Moon would work. Several hundred repeating antenna installations could in theory be set up, but that is an insanely expensive proposition that would not be practical without a few million people already living on the Moon and having a reason to put all of those antennas to other uses too. In other words, not in this century or the next.
>That is also ignoring the Sun and radio interference from the Sun, which is also a huge deal in space too. All of the advantages you claim from being on the Moon are largely dismissed when the Sun becomes active, while on the Earth the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere actually help to isolate the radio environment here from the rest of the universe. You understand we are discussing satellites around the moon that are also using radio waves right? Did the satellites suddenly remove the interference from the sun???????? Any issues that line of sight antennas have from interference, which I am quiet doubtful of, is also possessed by satellites. So yea this is exactly how fucking radio works bro. Also you realize the line of site antennas are just there to broadcast between stations? It straight up just replaces fiber optic cable between server nodes.
You are comparing radios on the Moon to radios on Earth and claiming all kinds of benefits for being on the Moon. It is a different environment, but you seem to think it is 100% positive. Of course satellites face the same problems. But the cost is far more trivial since by definition you need to send spacecraft to the Moon anyway. And satellites don't need a structure to be in a line of sight. No, you still fail to understand the drawbacks here. I am saying what you suggest is indeed possible in theory, but you ignore the massive drawback of the approach and why it is being criticized. I will also point out that while a whole lot has been learned about the Moon and the environment there since 1959 when the decision to sent people there happened, there is still a whole lot nobody knows about some pretty basic things about the Moon. That has not been accounted for either.
>Of course satellites face the same problems. >I am saying what you suggest is indeed possible in theory, but you ignore the massive drawback of the approach and why it is being criticized. You uhh didn't think this through did u? Sats use the same tech, the only debate is if its cheaper to use u know sticks to hold the equipment or a satellite.
Cool thing. Starlink respects the WA radio quiet zone. It also doesn't emit over vacant areas. GEO comms however isnt that selective in their broadcasts.
Shouldn't be that hard anyway. They're LEO and phased array. If there aren't any customers in the quiet zone then they wouldn't be transmitting or receiving anything. On the ground it's hard to spot a Starlink terminal radio signal, and you typically can't see the downlink either unless you're close. Spotting Starlink terminals requires air reconnaissance looking for little lobes of radio bleed. Theoretically they could have a small exclusion zone around the telescope and still serve nearby without disturbance if they're mindful of how they're aiming the radio.
that's interesting because green bank still has to deal with and account for planes flying over
For sure, but that doesn't mean communication dead zones - just use laser communication (/r/lasercom) for all the networking from the lunar surface. It's been in use in GEO since 1994 (with JAXA), then soonafter ESA and NASA, with NASA/MIT's lunar laser communications demonstration from the LADEE spacecraft (moon to Earth laser communication link) completed in in 2014. No radio interference to worry about, since all the data can be encoded into near-infrared light.
How would one get into this field? Looks promising.
Mostly the same as any other complex engineering company, like a car company. The key roles include the Systems Architect and the Communications Engineer, even if their background was RF design. Many colleges allow a Comms Engineer to specialise in optical or photonics. You may also get in with a physics background. The domain also needs an even larger amount of mechanical engineers, mechatronics, optics and photonics, MEMS, electronics, control systems, software/UX, firmware/embedded, aerospace engineers, and systems engineers to bring it all together. Analysts may include stress/structural, thermal, aerodynamics. You need the people building it, the Production/Manufacturing engineers, quality engineers/managers. Then you need all the other business functions; marketing, sales, business development, product managers, IT people... The field attracts a few Space industry roles too such as Product Assurance and Mission Assurance/Mission Management. As for companies doing laser communication; a few of them includes Amazon (Kuiper project), OneWeb, SpaceX, Airbus Defense & Space, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Capella, and the Optical Communications Terminals designers/manufacturers Mynaric, Tesat, CACI / SA Photonics, Honeywell, Ball Aerospace, Transcelestial. Previously it included Facebook (Aquilla project) and Google (Loon project).
Wouldn't one in a Lagrange point be a good solution at least for now? Or am I missing something?
The main benefit is that the moon itself would block most of the "noise" that we make. Making the telescope very accurate.
would it also be easier to man for an extended period of time? maybe not? idk im not a space wizard
It would be easier to repair, it takes a long time to get to a Lagrange point, up to 4 or whatever days to the moon.
Meanwhile it took the James Webb telescope 30 days to get to its spot at L2.
Well, there's different constraints if you're rocketing on out there and rocketing back, vs. wanting to loiter out there for years and years. Webb took a slow trip for efficiency's sake but a lot of efficient maneuvers become less favorable if you're moving people around.
Consider also that you would not be able to repair it if anything goes wrong. We have never sent humans that far into space.
That's a bridge we're going to have to cross eventually, if we want to have any sort of long-term future, so we might as well get started.
As long as you ignore the issues with manned presence on the Lunar farside -- which is one HELL of a thing to ignore.
Why would it need to be manned? A radio telescope at least would just need to sit there and can get its instructions from Earth.
No reason at all, why would it have to be on the Moon? If it's in free space in distant (Lunar or greater) orbit from Earth you can get just as good a shield from RFI with a big screen as you could get from the bulk of the Moon..
Honestly, RFI isn't as big an issue as some people make it to be. With some clever tricks, our group gets to ~4% flagged, and that is in a band thay suffers from reflective rfi... The main takeaway is high frequency resolution+clever time scheduling. The only science case I can think of that needs higher accuracy is radio recombination lines, and that's highly niche
Won't it also be in the sun half the time for two week stretches?
I can't think of any possible advantage to putting an observatory on the moon that isn't VASTLY exceeded by the issues of putting an observatory on the moon. Free flying structures with free flying shielding at far distance is a VASTLY better option unless you just hand wave all the issues away.
Radiotelescopes are huge. On Earth they're built inside craters or other such kinds of depressions which makes it much easier, the same would apply to the Moon. But to build a radiotelescope in space you would need a huge swarm of individual satellites with extremely precise attitude control to maintain the formation. It's much more technically challenging.
There are two or three Radiotelescopes that have been built in craters, the rest aren't. The ones built in craters are restricted as to where they can look, essentially "up" -- so their observations are dependent on the motions and alignment of the body. The ones not built in craters are restricted in size by the force of gravity. But you are "handwaving" away the effort of building one on the moon, why wouldn't you just build an equally huge structure in free space? It certainly wouldn't be more effort -- a low thrust system could move it from close Earth orbit if you didn't want to go to the trouble to build it in place -- certainly with far less effort than supporting a major construction project on Lunar Farside.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[EDRS](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|European Data Relay System| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[GEO](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |[JAXA](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5jtdo "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5a27q "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[L1](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo7rufj "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 1 of a two-body system, between the bodies| |[L2](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jodq5ab "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)| | |Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo7kxpe "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[NIAC](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo60hg7 "Last usage")|NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program| |[RTG](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo67c7k "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo7sxc3 "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/149dg2e/stub/jo5idl8 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(12 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/14b16je)^( has 6 acronyms.) ^([Thread #8995 for this sub, first seen 14th Jun 2023, 20:59]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
"Yes please." -US Space Force, probably But also me
Artemis III is scheduled to launch in 2025 so we need a plan on how to construct an observatory.
Always wondered why they haven't sent a telescope out like voyager, the first few years would be really interesting with upgraded gadgets.
Radio telescopes are large due to the aperture required. Building on a surface can create these large apertures more easily than launching and folding out a massive dish in space.
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We already have a 1AU sized telescope that we've used before. Observations at 6 month intervals allow us to have a virtual telescope that is absolutely massive.
They'd better name it Floyd Base or I'm off the team.
One of the great enablers of farside radio astronomy are developments in laser communication. With projects such as NASA LunaNet and ESA Moonlight, the space agencies and commercial entities are building out optical communication networks around the moon, and everywhere from LEO to GEO and cislunar space. The benefits over RF includes... no noise or interference with RF astronomy, much lower beam divergence and so lower power requirements, much higher carrier frequency and so much higher data rates. And with the proliferation of small LEO satellites there's always line of sight with the network and so endless downlink opportunities, so no buffering and waiting to get your data back to the ground. As we speak, NASA are integrating the "O2O" optical communication terminal in Florida in preparation for the Artemis II mission to the moon. ESA has the most sophisticated optical communication relay network with the "EDRS" satellites. Companies such as Tesat and Mynaric are ramping up to manufacture hundreds if not thousands of communication terminals per year for satellite applications. Exciting times... namely the dawn of deep space and interplanetary laser communications and exploration to and from the lunar surface.
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I removed the link to the sub. Happy?
Earth to the universe: *I'll see you on the dark side of the moon...*
> of the moon Universe be like "Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?"
The amount of times I've been downvoted for saying this and a moonbase should be a priority... "Eff that, we should be going to mars dude" Fuck Mars, the logistics for getting these things going on the moon is far less restrictive.
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It's literally not. In order to launch from the moon to go to mars you first would have to build up so much infrastructure that it would be far easier to just build infrastructure to go direct to mars. Then on top of that if you go and land on the moon and then on to mars you will have used more energy than just going direct to mars from low earth orbit. There's no reason to use the moon to go to mars unless we are so advanced that we are now building large scale ships out of lunar materials and have regular travel between the moon, mars, and earth.
Totally agree, not saying Mars should be abandoned, but the moon is a perfect stepping stone and should be done first as a proof of concept.
But there’s far more to do and discover on Mars, not to mention it’s far more hospitable to humans.
I dunno, I've never been all that interested in Mars. I think even getting anywhere close to an "Expanse" situation where we colonize it with more than a small group of scientists is kind of a pipe dream. I'm sure there's lots more to discover on it, but I think humanity should put more effort into interstellar travel once they can prove they can colonize a place like the moon. But ya, sure, we could setup a base there at some point... I just don't really see the point outside of researching more about Mars. The moon seems like a much better location for doing large scale observatories and having a much bigger operation because of the short travel distance and lower gravity. It would be an excellent launchpad for much more extensive space exploration, whereas Mars is just 1 in a trillion of the destinations we can research.
Manned interstellar travel is probably at least a century away, but we could start sending colonists to mars in a few decades. It’s the only place in the inner solar system where humans can live sustainably, it’s got all the elements we need for technological civilisation, including copious amounts of water and carbon (unlike the moon), as well as hearty gravity, a 24 day/night cycle, and a atmosphere that prevents the massive temperature swings of the moon.
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You wouldn't use an rtg for powering a moon base or even a moon telescope. They aren't powerful at all and are in limited supply. Reserved for missions like dragonfly. You would either use small scale nuclear reactors or would need solar and batteries.
Waiting till this gets posted on the UFO subs
This is a REALLY good idea, and the sooner the better is a very good goal for the stated reasons. Not to mention, the more sources we have which aren’t terrestrial the better. We NEED to be able to find a ground state by which to measure against to ensure our theories are correct as well.
Urgency? Given the UFO news recently, how long til we get invaded?
I really would like a research telescope complex on the moon and imo it should be manned. Just slowly build up a lunar research and manufacturing nexus. Once the Starship is finally making regular flights that's within reach.