Friday, February 22nd, 2008

See You from The Dark Side of the Moon

Jacqueline Hewitt, director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Science, stands behind a prototype of a radio telescope array planned for the far side of the moon. Donna Coveney, MIT.

Preliminary plans are underway for an array of new radio telescopes on the far side of the moon. The Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) is planned as an array of hundreds of telescope modules designed to pick up very-low-frequency radio emissions, and would cover an area of up to two square kilometers. The project is just in its initial planning stages, however, with construction unlikely to begin until at least 2025. In this segment, Joe Palca talks with one of the researchers on the LARC project about the future observatories and what science would stand to gain from such an ambitious telescope project.