As a child within the Nineteen Seventies, I watched the Apollo moon missions on TV, drawn like a curious moth to the cathode-ray tube’s glow. The English band Pink Floyd blared by means of the audio system of my mother’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, beckoning us to the darkish facet of the moon.
The far facet of the moon, the time period most scientists desire, is certainly darkish (half the time), chilly, and inhospitable. There’s regolith and a few Chinese language landers—Chang’e 4 in January 2019 and Chang’e 6 in June 2024—and never a lot else. That would change in a few yr, as Contributing Editor Ned Potter experiences in “The Quest to Construct a Telescope That Can Hear the Cosmic Darkish Ages.” Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 with the LuSEE-Evening radio telescope aboard will try and grow to be the third profitable mission to land there.
The moon’s far facet is the right place for such a telescope. The identical RF waves that carried photographs of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar floor, Roger Waters’s voice, and a whole lot of Ned Potter’s house and science segments for the U.S. broadcast networks CBS and ABC intervene with terrestrial radio telescopes. In case your aim is to detect the extraordinarily faint and closely redshifted alerts of impartial hydrogen from the cosmic Darkish Ages, you simply can’t do it from Earth. This epoch is so-called as a result of we Earthlings have but to sense something from this time interval, which began about 380,000 years after the massive bang and lasted 200 million to 400 million years. The far facet of the moon could also be a horrible place to dwell, however it’s shielded from all of the noise of Earth, making it the perfect spot to put a radio telescope.
As Potter emphasised to me just lately, LuSEE-Evening received’t hear for a sign from Darkish Ages hydrogen instantly. “Will the hydrogen from the Darkish Ages ship a sign? No,” says Potter. “However all that hydrogen on the market might take in just a little little bit of vitality from the cosmic microwave background, interfering with that much more distant remnant of the massive bang.”
The far facet might not keep quiet for for much longer. A number of international locations, together with China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and america, are making gradual however regular progress towards establishing a lunar presence. As they accomplish that, they’ll place extra relay satellites into orbit across the moon to assist exploratory actions in addition to moon bases deliberate for the following decade and past. Which means the window on a noise-free far facet is closing. LuSEE-Evening, a challenge 40 years within the making, may simply get there within the nick of time.
Potter is monitoring rising protocols that might protect the far facet’s electromagnetic silence at the same time as such efforts advance. Radio astronomers he’s talked to have shared concepts about forestall this rising drawback from turning right into a disaster. “There are not any unhealthy guys on this story, a minimum of not but,” says Potter. “However there are lots of well-meaning individuals who may complicate the image a fantastic deal in the event that they don’t know that there’s an image to complicate.”
It’s a busy time for moon missions. Along with Blue Ghost Mission 2, the Chinese language are sending Chang’e 7 to the moon’s south pole, whereas NASA’s Artemis II is scheduled to enter the primary of three launch home windows this month. Artemis II would be the first mission to place people into lunar orbit for the reason that final Apollo mission in 1972. And IEEE Spectrum readers will get pleasure from a entrance row seat, because of the enterprising reporting of a real legend within the enterprise, our personal Ned Potter.
This text seems within the February 2026 print difficulty as “See You on the Far Facet of the Moon.”
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