[X] My Assistant

[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

[edstrick]

The sorts of things that make reasonible lunar astronomical observatories, other than things that really have an advantage being done from the moon (like a farside ultra-low-wave interferometer) are things like the Apollo 16 ultraviolet camera.

If you're going to the moon, can carry an instrument that needs minimal setup and can do nicely with a power supply cord and a ethernet cable, the "no other spacecraft required" design can be an advantage.

An updated version of the Apollo 16 camera could be an Earth-fixed ultraviolet aurora and plasmasphere observations instrument. Carry it off to it's "quiet spot", point it, plug it in, and nearly forget it.

It's utterly not worth the cost of lunar missions to be able to do things like that, but once you have the lunar missions, small, worthwhile science things can "parasitize" on them like getaway specials used to do on the shuttle.

[marsbug]

A little news on the farside radio-astronomy idea.