Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science

A radio-telescope on the lunar farside.

It's been a "dream" of radio-astronomers
for half-a-century to have a radio-telescope set up on the farside of the
moon.
Unfortunately, all the designs for one that I've seen either involve a very expensive, steerable rigid-frame, rigid metal-skin radio telescopes to be established there,
or the 'less-expensive' idea of using a natural farside lunar crater as a radio-telescope dish.

The PROBLEM for establishing a steerable rigid-frame radio telescope on the lunar farside is of course EXPENSE:
AT LEAST ten billion dollars [plus] just to construct it on the lunar farside.

The PROBLEMS for trying to CONVERT a farside crater into a radio-telescope dish
are these: It's not STEERABLE...and there's expense involved in engineering
[cleaning, grooming & shaping] a farside crater into a natural radio-telescope dish.

There may be a compromise solution:
"What about inflatable structures?"
Imagine a radio-telescope whose "dish"
can be an inflatable plastic mylar-skin that is pre-adjusted and pre-fitted to inflate [at low gas pressure] into two face-to-face
"parabolic" convex lens/dishes. One of the face-to-face parabolic dishes would be coated with a thin metal film to reflect and focus radio waves onto a retractable/portable antenna. Inflated on the moon, it would be over 100 meters [330ft] in diameter, YET the entire package, deflated, would fit into somebody's suitcase [including
the collapsible, retractable "telescoping"
antenna & the electronics package].
EXPENSIVE? Maybe it would cost
a few hundred million to design, build, test, & package.

Jacob

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