[X] My Assistant

[marsbug]

Hello everybody, I've developed a bit of a fascination with the moon recently, and so I was delighted to read this about a private group in hawai making progress toward putting an unmanned observatory on the moon. I couldn't find any mention of it in either the lunar exploration or private missions section, so I thought I'd start a thread to see what peoples thoughts are on the idea. Is it a good one, and if so why has it not been done before? What exactly will it be used for?

[simonbp]

I think probably the key advantage of an observatory close to a Lunar base is the same as for Hubble in LEO, proximity to repair. NASA's planning to build its base at the south pole, in one of the areas of constant sunlight (so power and thermal cycles aren't a concern). This might not be the absolute best for radio (though you can selectively put a mountain between the dish and Earth), the real advantage is bottom of the permanently shadowed craters, which at a constant 40 K. You land build a great big cryogenic IR telescope down there , and then just run power/data lines up to the moonbase...

Probably the best way to mitigate dust around lunar optics is to "bake" the surrounding surface; regolith is high in iron and easy heated by microwaves. So, you literally just sweep the area around the scope with a magnetron, melting and solidifying the surface, and removing nearly all sources of dust (except for electrostatic transport, but that's relatively slow)...

Simon