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Did you mean can NASA do it? Yeah I think NASA should do it.
by garyfirestorm 5y ago
Did you mean can NASA do it? Yeah I think NASA should do it.
- ncmncm 5y agoIf it's un-crewed, it should be brilliant. Another pair of telescopes should be sited in Shackleton Crater, 21 km across, at the exact south pole of the moon. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110423.html https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110423.html One of them would be a conventional radio telescope. The other, an infrared telescope. The temperature within the crater is a nearly-constant 90K. You could power it with solar panels rotating on vertical axes posted at strategic points on the crater rim, that are almost always in sunlight. The crater is so big that, for the infra scope, you could build it out of optically flat mirrors placed around the circumference. The crater always points to the same spot in the sky, so you could get really, really long exposures. That you can't point it is OK, because there is so much to see if you are looking far enough away. At some distance and red-shift it would be an X-ray telescope, others an ultraviolet scope. Maybe a gamma-ray scope, at the extremum?
- dylan604 5y agoI'm all about having the SR Hadden Lunar Radio if that's what it takes to get the thing. If NASA builds it, if ESA builds it, if JAXA builds it, I don't care. Private funding is not a new thing for getting telescopes built, but the private funders are not the ones doing the building. They just write the checks.