Credit: CC0 Public domain
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Credit: CC0 Public domain
On February 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus landed near the moon’s south pole and released four antennas to record radio waves around the surface — a moment that astrophysicist Jack Burns of the University of Colorado Boulder hails as the “dawn of radio astronomy from the moon’. .”
It was a major achievement for the tenacious lander, which was built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines and had to overcome a series of technical difficulties to reach the moon’s surface. Burns is a co-investigator on the radio experiment that flew aboard Odysseus, called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photo Electron Sheath (ROLSES).
He will provide an update on the ROLSES data and talk about what’s in store for future radio astronomy from the moon at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, this week.
“It was heroic for intuitive machines to land under these conditions and deploy our antennas, collect some data and bring that data back to Earth,” said Burns, professor emeritus in the department of astrophysical and planetary sciences at CU Boulder .
Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, led the ROLSES experiment. The instrument, which contained the antennas and a device called a radio spectrometer, was designed to record a wide range of radio emissions near the moon and deep in space.
Despite the mission’s challenges, ROLSES managed to view Earth in a unique way.
“We thought of Earth as an exoplanet, or a planet orbiting another star,” Burns says. “That allows us to ask the question: What would our radio emissions from Earth look like if they came from an alien civilization on a nearby exoplanet?”
Earth selfie
Odysseus traveled to the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, an ambitious effort to land spacecraft built by private companies on the lunar surface. It was the first such mission to achieve what NASA calls a “soft landing,” although the mission fell on its side in the process.
But it almost didn’t happen. Among other challenges, Odysseus was unable to use his laser-guided navigation system to land on the steep surface of the moon. Instead, the operators at Intuitive Machines relied entirely on the lander’s optical camera system – an impressive feat of maneuvering.
While Odysseus was traveling to the moon, one of the ROLSES antennas slightly overheated and shot out of its housing on the lander. (A selfie of the spacecraft shows the antenna extending into space). It turned out to be a stroke of luck, Burns said.
The team used the accident to look at Earth for almost an hour and a half and record radio waves coming from the planet. Human technologies, including cell phones and cell towers, produce radio emissions almost constantly. Astronomer Carl Sagan conducted a similar experiment from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s, but the ROLSES data was more extensive.
Burns noted that scientists may be able to look for similar fingerprints from planets far away from our own – a potential sign of intelligent life.
Moonrise
He and his colleagues are just getting started. NASA has already given the green light for a second ROLSES experiment, which will likely fly on another CLPS lander in 2026.
The astrophysicist is also part of a third CLPS experiment, known as the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), which is expected to arrive on the moon in 2026. The instrument will land on the far side of the moon, a quiet place. that human radio emissions cannot reach. From there it will look at radio emissions that come not from Earth, but from the earliest days of the universe before the first stars formed, the so-called Dark Ages. This will shed more light on how the cosmos evolved during this crucial juncture in its history.
“As NASA plans to send two or three landers to the moon each year, we have a way to upgrade our instruments and learn from what goes wrong in a way we haven’t been able to do since the early days of the space program. ” said Burns.