The ten-year lunar telescope concept could become a reality – BGR

• A group of astronomers studied a 2008 proposal to build a telescope on the moon.
• The telescope would be able to look back to the origins of the universe and could provide images of the first stars ever created.
• There are no guarantees that the telescope will be built, but it is not excluded.

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NASA does a lot of amazing things, with projects ranging from sending rovers to other planets to launching observatories into orbit around the Earth, but not all proposals NASA likes end up becoming reality. In fact, many seemingly grand ideas have to be pushed aside due to budget or technology constraints, and often those ideas are never revised. For a long-wrecked project, that may change, as astronomers from the University of Texas at Austin have discovered a ten-year-old concept for a lunar telescope that could finally see the light of day.

As scientists will explain in a new article to be published The Astrophysical Journal, a proposal originally submitted to NASA in 2008 for a “Lunar Liquid-Mirror Telescope” or LLMT, may eventually solve some problems that astronomers are still struggling with today.

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The telescope, called “Ultimately Large Telescope”, would measure 100 meters in diameter and would be installed on the lunar surface. After being built, the observatory would not need to be equipped, as it would be solar powered and could be remotely controlled, just like telescopes orbiting the Earth today.

But how do you build a 100-meter-wide telescope on the moon? Transporting such materials to the moon would be a serious task, but it gets a little easier when you use a liquid as a mirror instead of shiny glass.

Rather than coated glass, the telescope mirror would be made of liquid, as it is lighter, and therefore cheaper, to transport to the moon. The telescope mirror would be a rotating tank of liquid, surmounted by a metallic liquid, and therefore reflective. (Previous liquid mirror telescopes had used mercury.) The tank spun continuously, to keep the surface of the liquid in the correct paraboloid shape to function as a mirror.

But why attach a telescope to the moon? Well, a telescope on the moon with the power of UL could potentially peer far enough into space to see some of the very first stars ever created. Due to the nature of the way light travels, scientists believe it would be possible to direct the telescope to a fixed point in space and, by collecting light over a long period of time, it could detect stars so far away that the light we are seeing from them they originated shortly after the Big Bang.

Now, just because a group of scientists say the telescope would be useful doesn’t mean it will change its fate. NASA should carefully review the 10-year proposal and review it to see if it makes sense. However, with manned missions to the moon planned for the foreseeable future, that may not be out of the question.