Colloquium Abstract - Burns - 2024Sep27

September 27, 2024

11:00am Mountain

Jack O. Burns (UC Boulder)

 

The Dawning of Radio Astronomy from the Moon

 

Abstract

The first robotic commercial lunar lander, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus, successfully touched down on the Moon in the South Pole region on 22 February 2024. This mission was part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Odysseus carried with it the first NASA radio astronomy telescope to the surface of the Moon – Radiowave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES). ROLSES collected engineering and science data in cislunar transit using one of four antennas prior to entering lunar orbit, as well as data from the lunar surface over multiple days using all antennas, despite the tilting of the Odysseus lander. ROLSES was built by NASA-GSFC in collaboration with the University of Colorado. The ROLSES spectrometer obtained spectra over the range 2 kHz – 30 MHz with 8-sec time resolution. The science goals included measuring the electron density of the near-surface plasma, detecting terrestrial anthropogenic and Earth’s Auroral Kilometric Radiation, and measuring the Galactic background below 30 MHz. In this talk, I will describe the outcomes from ROLSES including initial science results. In addition, two follow-on lunar missions scheduled for 2026 including an upgraded ROLSES-2 and LuSEE-Night will be described. LuSEE-Night will be the first low frequency radio telescope on the lunar far side to explore the frequency band associated with the unexplored Dark Ages of the early Universe – selected as the Discovery Area for Cosmology in the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. Finally, I will discuss the NASA-funded FarView project, an early-stage concept for a large, low-frequency radio observatory, manufactured in-situ on the lunar far side using metals extracted from the lunar regolith and designed to observe the redshifted 21-cm power spectrum from the Dark Ages. It consists of 100,000 dipole antennas in compact subarrays distributed over a total area of 150 km2, with a dense core that is ≈4 km square and an outer halo extending to a diameter of ≈12 km. I will describe our efforts on developing model predictions for the power spectrum and on sensitivity forecasting.


Local Host: Rick Perley

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