Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to A radio-telescope on the lunar farside.

Re: A radio-telescope on the lunar farside.

"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]."
I don't think so, it would need to be extremely thin, just to fit the balloon part in a suitcase. In comparison you should look in what size a weather balloon would be deflated to. A weather balloon is smaller and you would probably want more durable material then used in a weather balloon. Without even researching it, I'm pretty confident that a large weather balloon wouldn't fit in a suitcase.
Nor would this thin walled inflatable balloon be steerable on the Moon- it wouldn't have structure strength. It would be better to put it in orbit- you could point it and other advantages, but you would of course need some kind of station keeping (it makes a great solar sail:), unless you put in Sun orbit, and allow it to go to a higher and higher orbit. Oh, you also are going to need to do something about radio infereferance from Sun and manmade sources."

Anyway, get back to Lunar telescope:
"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."

First off there is no reason to have on farside, it could be near the edge of Nearside or in polar regions. Second it could be done for less than 10 billion. The main reason, as far as I'm concerned for building a telescope on the Moon would be to use lunar material. We aren't ready to build a telescope on the Moon at this time. We should first determine if there is minable water in the lunar polar region. If commerical mining companies are mining lunar water then, building a lunar radio telescope will be relatively cheap. How much is would cost would depend on how big you wanted it and how much resolution you wanted, etc. But without trying to get into all the details, at THIS moment, if someone had 10 billion to spend and they wanted a lunar telescope at had the resolution of say a 100 meter dish or better, then they could get it.
After lunar mining of water has begun, I think that it's quite possible that you could get a lunar telescope bigger and cheaper than one built on Earth- in other words, say, you are comparing scopes in the km diameter range.

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