[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]

Oh, forget a 2m dish, just find a suitable crater and build a mini-Arecibo; if you've got a crew around to bang pegs into the ground, the landed mass could be pretty small (mesh and stiffeners for the reflector, three cable-stayed towers, and a box for the receiver). The base will probably have pressurized rovers with a range of around 900 km, so the radio observatory doesn't have to be at the south pole to be human-supported...

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/07...a_moonbase.html

Simon